The Art of Concentration (Samatha Meditation)

by Rob Burbea
Recorded at Gaia House, 2008-08-08 – 2008-08-12
http://dharmaseed.org/retreats/1183/
Transcribed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0
International License by members of reddit.com/r/streamentry.

Table of Contents
1: 2008-08-08 Talk One: Introduction to the Art of Concentration (Samatha Meditation)..............1
2: 2008-08-09 First Morning Instructions and Guided Meditation................................................10
3: 2008-08-09 Talk Two: Understanding the Heart........................................................................13
4: 2008-08-10 Second Morning Instructions and Guided Meditation............................................27
5: 2008-08-10 Talk Three: Wise Effort and Wise Attachment........................................................32
6: 2008-08-11 Third Morning Instructions.....................................................................................44
7: 2008-08-11 Talk Four: Jhanas One to Four................................................................................48
8: 2008-08-12 Fourth Morning Instructions...................................................................................59
9: 2008-08-12 Talk Five: Samatha, Nibbana, and the Emptiness of Perception - The Relationship
Between Concentration and Insight................................................................................................62

1: 2008-08-08 Talk One: Introduction to the Art of Concentration (Samatha

Meditation)
I would just like to say how happy I am to be here and to share these teachings with you, and to share
something of what I feel like the gift that has come to me from the Dharma, and particularly these
teachings around samatha. I feel like they and the Dharma as a whole have just made such a massive
revolution in my life, and it’s just a real joy to share it with you.
Some of you I know, and a lot of you I don’t know, so my name is Rob – and just let me introduce
Chris. Chris is sitting here, some of you will be able to see him. Chris will be assisting me on the
retreat.
So here we are on retreat, and you made it here. In a way any retreat, any retreat that we do is kind of
stepping out of the stream, and a stream of our daily life, and stepping into another stream... stepping
into a contemplative stream, and that stream – that contemplative stream – is something that just goes
back and back and back, and it’s ancient, in generations, and millennia in fact, of human beings who
have wanted to take themselves away a little bit from the bustle and the busyness, just put that aside
and enter into something else, enter into a period long or short, in order to inquire more deeply into life,
in order to see what is possible for human beings, what is possible for consciousness. To just have the
question «Is it possible that I can meet life differently? Is that possible? Is it possible that there’s an
understanding that can come, is it possible I can understand life differently?» I can understand life and
death, even, differently. That’s behind this movement, it’s behind this stepping into the stream.
So in a way, when we come into this stream we’re actually supported by the momentum of that stream,
and the momentum of countless human beings over millennia that have... gone into that, made the same
movement, asked the same questions.
This is a Samatha retreat, so this word Samatha – you probably know by now – means calm, or
tranquility. I’m going to be using two words pretty much interchangeably. One of them is Samatha, one
of them is Samadhi. They do have slight differences, but for now it’s not important. I’ll just probably
use them interchangeably... Samatha, Samadhi. Calm... Tranquility... Most usually just translate it as
concentration, which is fine; a collectedness of mind, a unification of the mind and the body together.
Samatha, Samadhi, that collectedness, that calm, that concentration leads to pleasure. It leads to
happiness. And I’m saying it right from the beginning of this retreat, it’s supposed to lead to pleasure, a
sense of well-being, a sense of happiness. This is what we are aiming towards. And more and more
over time, a really deep sense of pleasure and happiness and well-being. Really deep... profound…
more profound, I would easily wager, than anything one has known before. That’s gradual, so. [laughs]
This is not just a Buddhist thing. So... Samadhi, Samatha... they are even words that are in other
traditions. It’s not just a Buddhist effort, or project to develop calmness, concentration, et cetera. It goes
way back, actually quite a long time before the Buddha, but the Buddha placed huge emphasis on it in
his teachings. And if you flick through the original discourses of what the Buddha taught, every few
pages he is referring to it and telling people to develop it. «Develop Samatha. Develop concentration».
Very, very large emphasis on it. In fact, he recalls that – some of you know the story – his decision to
really cultivate Samatha and concentration was a huge turning point in his practice, one of the main
turning points... He had left the palace, an he had engaged in years of severe and hardcore asceticism...
really starving himself, really gung-ho asceticism. And one day he had a memory. In a memory of when
he was a small child sitting in the garden of his father, the king, sitting in the shade of a rose apple tree.
He was watching a farmer in the distance plowing a field, and there was something in his being there
that enabled him to settle, to open up into a lovely state of a mind unified, a lovely state of Samatha.
Very unifying, very present, very bright, very joyful. And he remembered that as he was practicing his
hardcore asceticism, and he said that «The sense was that that is blameless... there’s nothing wrong
with that, and what’s more, it’s probably fruitful. There’s fruit there if I can develop that». He changed
his direction and re-visited those kind of states, that kind of Samatha, et cetera. Later on, after his
awakening he said «As long as there is respect for Samadhi in people who practice, the Dharma will
not decline».
Most of the retreats I teach are insight meditation retreats, and sometimes some other stuff. Mostly it’s
insight meditation retreats. This is a different kind of retreat. It’s going to have a slightly somewhat of a
different emphasis... somewhat of a different tone than the usual way I would approach teaching. And
one of the aspects of that is that I’m almost exclusively only going to be talking about meditation. So
usually I would be bringing in a lot of daily life stuff and examples, et cetera, I’m now mostly going to
be talking about meditation... certainly in the instructions, but even in the Dharma talks.
I’m really, really wanting to explore and give a foundation, hopefully, of both the techniques involved
here and the art of it. Because what we are really talking about is art. No question about that. It’s not so
much about rules of technique like «when this happens you do this and... like that like..». Sometimes it
can be that simple translation, but it’s more of an art, and in a way I want to communicate something of
the art of it and hope that you begin to get a little feel for the art of it yourself.
I’m also going to say way too much... I’ll be saying quite a lot of stuff. Much too much, probably, than
you could take in at the time. I’m going to be putting lots of information out... Lots of little tips and
approaches and things to consider, et cetera. Why? Because people are different, because it’s an art. I
don’t know how many people are in this hall, 60-something or whatever. Different people hear different
things... Different people need different things at different times. Different people respond to different
things at different times. Different people will find different things useful at different times.
So, in putting out some of the instructions, it’s not even that they are particularly linear. It’s more sort
of a buffet kind of affair. And because I can’t say everything at once I’m going to have to say them in a
certain order. It might be that something later would have been useful in the beginning. Whatever. We
can just do what we can do. I will also be mentioning some things sort of in passing, and amplifying
them later and repeating other facets, et cetera.
So, I’m talking to you – obviously, but I’m also talking to this black thing here in the sense that I’m
talking to you right now, and some of you will like this; some of you are going to really like it a lot.
Some of you will not be interested in it at all. But some of you will want to really pursue this
afterwards, and that’s why I’m talking to the black thing... the recorder. Don’t worry if you don’t get
everything. Assuming it works [laughs], it will be recorded and be there for you to revisit, and you’ll
say, «Oh, I didn’t even hear that the first time.» It’s okay. Take what you can get, and kind of let the rest
go, trusting that the machine is working.
So, I want to talk a lot about attitude tonight, the attitude that we bring to practice, and the attitude that
we bring to retreat. Two words tonight, two P’s, Play and Patience. These are really key for this
practice... actually I think for all meditation practice, but particularly for Samatha. What does play
mean? What does it mean to play with our practice? What does the word play mean? To me it means
there’s an element of creativity, there’s an element of curiosity, there’s experimentation, but in a light
way. We might – if we see some kids playing, it’s very serious, but they’re really enjoying it. That
attitude, as much as possible, needs to come into your meditation practice. It’s alive with that spirit of
play, of experimentation, moment to moment. I’m going to say this over and over, I really want to
emphasize it.
What are we playing with in this particular practice? We are playing with the breath. I’ll explain what I
mean later. We are playing with the ways we conceive the breath. So usually I think, well, got these
holes here, and the breath comes in, and then it goes out. Actually, that’s just one way of conceiving of
the breath. We’re playing, I want to encourage you and I’ll unfold all this over the days, we’re playing
with the way we conceive of the breath. We’re also playing with the way the mind relates to the breath
in the body. So, as human beings, what do we have? We have mind, body and breath. And that
relationship of the way the mind relates to the body. I’ll be amplifying this a lot over the days.
In terms of effort, of forcefulness of attention, of – sort of strength of attention, lightness or delicacy of
attention... These are all really important factors, relaxing the attention. So playing with the breath,
playing with the conceiving of the breath, playing with the mind’s relationship to the breath, and lastly,
playing with perception. We’re actually playing with perception, it turns out, when we do these
practices, and I’ll explain all this over the days.
So play, very important, and patience. Now this is a beginning here – we’ve got five days together or
whatever it is, and we are beginning something here, it’s actually a lifelong process. It really is. So to
have patience, it won’t be linear. It’s going to be up and down. What I want to give you is something
you can take away with you, in terms of tools that you can work with. That’s what I really want to give
to you and want you to be able to take away.
So, I would ask and encourage, also – partly based on last year’s experience – that you have an open
mind to this... particularly if you have done a lot of meditation before, funnily enough. If you have
done a lot of vipassana, Zen or insight meditation or whatever it is, I’d ask that you have an open mind,
just have a sense of experimenting for five days. Because this will probably feel new, and a different
approach, a different orientation to what practice is.
So with the techniques I’m giving out, if it really doesn’t work after a few days, just come and say so to
me. I’m not fixed on this technique; I don’t really care that much about the technique. It’s fine. We can
find something that works. Some of you in this hall I know, and I know quite well; I know your
practices well. But one or two of you, a small handful right now, already you’ve been practicing in a
way that the practice feels very good. I’m just talking to a small handful of people. It already feels very
good in the body. If it already feels very good, stick with what you have, and we can keep going there.
So, you know who I’m talking to.
Okay, so as I say we’re going to play with the breath, we’re actually manipulating the breath in this
practice – not all the time – but we’re going to be doing it as a part of the practice. So it’s not like most
of the ways Pranayama gets done. It’s much more subtle than that, but we are manipulating the breath.
Now, often, there is quite an objection to this, as if we shouldn’t be manipulating the breath, like
something kind of «that’s not proper meditation, that’s not what you do if you’re spiritual». But I would
just come right back with a question and say «Why not?». So this is quite common for most people to
have been taught not to manipulate the breath, not to play with the breath, to let the breath be as it is. I
would say «Why not?». And to be honest, I’ve never had anyone explain it satisfactorily to me, but I
think part of our resistance might be that we talk so much in meditation about «being with what is».
And a lot of the thrust of practice is to just be with things as they are, letting go of the compulsion to
fiddle around with everything and change it, make it better.
But «being with what is», beautiful as it is, can never be the whole of practice. Never. If our practice is
just «being with what is» and not kind of responding, or shaping things, then that kind of practice does
not translate all that well to our daily life. We are not a hundred percent passive all the time in our life...
no way. We are responding and shaping things and steering all the time, every day. Can you imagine
driving your car and the road veers around to the right, and you are just «being with what is»? [laughs]
It’s silly.
So why, actually, would we want to manipulate the breath? Why would we want to the breath? Well to
go back to something I mentioned earlier, we are interested in making the sense of the body and the
breath as pleasurable and comfortable as possible... very gradually, very slowly... that’s where we are
headed in this practice. We are actually intending consciously to increase the pleasure, the sense of
pleasure. And one of the ways we do, a significant way we do that, is actually by breathing...
manipulating the breathing, playing with the breath, until it feels good.
When there is pleasure in the body, the mind, the consciousness, can actually settle with that. Most of
the times with breath meditation where breath comes in and out it’s pretty boring. When there is some
pleasure, the mind is actually interested in staying there instead of just skipping off all the time. I will
talk much more about this, but that pleasure – that sense of comfort, of ease and openness, of warmth
and calm – in the body, even just a little bit, slowly we build that and it becomes a real resource for us
in our life, an immense resource for us in our life. It’s not a small thing. So, to just be open-minded
about that if you find yourself struggling with the idea. Also – and I will repeat a lot of what I say
tonight over the days – to be open-minded in the sense of trying to let go of preconceived notions of
what the breath should feel like. As I said, we tend to think the breath come in near the mouth, the
nostrils, and it feels a certain way or it feels a certain way here, whatever, which is all fine of course.
That’s real. But what would it be like to actually try to put that aside, just let go of that, and be very
open in terms of how the breath might feel? How the breath moving in the body might feel. Or where I
should feel the breath in the body. We tend to think that it’s just going down the tubes here, so that’s the
only place where I can feel it. Well, maybe not. So just see if there can be an openness about that.
And we allow things to get more comfortable, just slowly. So we are interested in, in this practice, the
energy flow in the body. That’s what we are working with. If that sounds completely abstract now,
don’t worry, we will be working with this and I will explain it to you, and hopefully it will become very
clear. We are interested in the sense of the vibration of the body. That’s what we are interested in. There
is a lot to discover here, it’s a whole world. There’s a beautiful world of discovery if we can be open.
So on the retreat, when I say body I don’t necessarily mean nails, fingers and spleens and that. What I
mean is this area as a sense of energy and vibration, the texture of that and the feeling of that. So when
I say «How is the body» and «Be with the body» and «Be with the whole body» I mean «Be with the
sense of that area. And when I say the breath I mean the movement of energy within that, as well as the
air coming in and out and the sense of that. So I mean the totality of it.
So Samadhi... Sometimes we get the sense that Samadhi is just a kind of unification. You have an
object, like the breath, or like a candle or something, and it’s kind of the mind sticking with that,
unifying with that. Kind of just melting into it. And it is that, definitely, but in a way it is much more
than that., what Samadhi is and what I’m really wanting to point to and open up on this retreat. It’s a lot
more than that. It is that, but it’s more than that. And it has a lot to do with letting go. Samadhi and
Samatha has a lot to do with letting go of the entanglement that we usually have with things, with the
world, with others, with ourselves, with the present moment, the past, the future. Letting go of
entanglement is actually the primary condition for Samadhi and Samatha.
And that letting go, letting go of stuff and coming into kind of a unification allows what the Buddha
calls – one way he called Samadhi – was a lovely abiding. It allows a lovely abiding, a pleasant
abiding. And in a way that’s a big part of what Samatha is, we’re cultivating that pleasant abiding. In
that and through that, our perceptions begin to change. Our perceptions of the breath, of the body, of
ourselves, all kinds of stuff, begin to change, to soften, to open up. We begin to open, the consciousness
begins to refine, just gradually, slowly, not in a linear way. Begins to refine and get more subtle. Things
get more subtle, including our sense of body and breath.
So some here might be hearing that and think «Well that sounds pretty selfish, to just sit here and kind
of get as pleasant and blissful as we can». We’re talking about attitude here tonight, and I think it’s
really important to see that this is not a selfish process, and if possible, to actually shift it out of that,
out of any kind of overly self-preoccupied agenda.
Ajahn Buddhadasa was a – he’s dead now, but in the 20th century he was one of the great Thai Forest
meditation masters, a monk in Thailand – died in the 90s – and he used say «Meditation is a public
health measure». You understand? It’s like what we do here is actually rippling out. We meditate for the
sake of all beings, ultimately speaking, for the welfare of all beings. Absolutely. What, as a human
being, what am I putting out in the world? What am I putting out in terms of actions? Is the ripple
peaceful, is it helpful? Is it bringing joy? What am I putting out in terms of speech? This is huge. What
am I putting out in terms of the thoughts and the energetic vibrations? So we have a big impact on each
other as human beings, and we are sensitive as human beings. What am I putting out? Sometimes when
we practice we lose a bit of the incentive for our practice, and that’s going to happen from time to time.
Sometimes reminding ourselves that it’s not just for me, I’m not just doing this for me, I’m doing it for
all beings, actually can help. We can deliberately reflect on this in the meditation, to reorient, to open
up our sense of inspiration and incentive.
Ajahn Buddhadasa, who I just referred to, he used to begin every Dharma talk with «Sisters and
brothers, in aging, sickness and death». Which some of you may know is a very Buddhist kind of
concept. Basically he was saying «Look, we’re in this boat together, and it’s sinking». [laughter] That’s
the reality, we are sisters and brothers in aging, sickness and death. There’s not one person in this hall...
one person alive today who is not going to go through that. We share that as human beings, and there is
something about having that shared sense at the core of our aspiration for practice. We are doing this
because we are sisters and brothers in aging, sickness and death. So we can really reflect on this. You
know, sometimes after one is over the honeymoon period of meditation, which if you are really new it’s
probably going to be sometime tomorrow morning...[laughter] Or, if you have been doing it for years
it’s very easy to slip into a kind of , not all the time but just sometimes, you just, you’re sitting, and
you’re sitting regularly, and you’re meditating regularly, but there’s a sense of just getting through it,
getting it over and done with, because that’s kind of a part of what you do in your life. And that
happens to all of us, but in a way – one of my teachers used to say «This kind of ‘getting it over with’
mind, getting through, how does that help? What does that do for my sisters and brothers in aging,
sickness and death, when I’m just trying to get through? I might not care, but what am I giving others?
So right from the beginning there’s something very important about attitude here, and seeing if that can
open up, and encouraging it to open up at times.
The Buddha talked about generosity, dana, as a basis for this practice. So we can regard our practice in
meditation as an act of dana, of generosity. Dana is a Pali word meaning ‘giving’, or ‘generosity’. We
can regard it as an act of generosity towards all beings. Others will be less subject to my irritation, my
bad moods, my anger, my reactivity, my lack of calm, my thoughtlessness, et cetera. That’s a gift, just
that others are less subject to that. This is very important, and that’s why I’m mentioning it tonight. We
can bring this attitude of giving, we can resurrect it over and over in the practice when we feel we need
it. It’s very easy for practice to become quite tight, particularly practice like Samatha where we are very
clear right from the beginning that we’re trying to get something out of it, we’re trying to get calm,
we’re trying to develop a sense of well-being, et cetera. It’s very easy, because there’s a goal – and I’ll
be talking a lot about this on the retreat – for the mind to get a little tight around that. When I shift the
view to practice as a giving to others, when there is a movement of giving in the heart it creates a sense
of spaciousness. Have you noticed this? Generosity, as a movement, creates spaciousness in the mind
and the heart. And when it get too tight, it allows a spaciousness, and that allows practice to unfold
instead of strangling it.
Recently, in the last couple of months, few weeks, I saw four films about climate change and the
environmental crisis, and one of them was a new film by Al Gore. It’s about half an hour, it’s floating
around on the internet, I don’t know if anyone’s come across that. It’s really very good. I don’t know
what it’s called. And I saw a film called Crude Impact, also very good, and Eleventh Hour. Almost
every time after seeing these films that were, I thought, very thoughtful and well-made, I came away
wondering whether humanity could pull this off or not. You know, it’s such a massive thing. Why is it
we keep falling asleep with it? Why is it that it’s…I don’t want to get political, but it was in that film,
the Eleventh Hour, how many questions Barack Obama and John McCain, et cetera, had been asked by
different news channels in the US. It was like 358 from CNN, 300 from whatever station. How many of
those were on climate change? 0, 2, 1 et cetera. Why is it we fall asleep around this? And even more as
humanity, are we capable of the kind of letting go, the shift, the renunciation that seems – as I feel it
right now – seems to be being asked of us? Are we actually capable of that, as a collective but also
individually? Are we capable of that renunciation?
The inner reservoir of well-being, of happiness, what we are slowly gathering in this practice, it makes
such a huge difference. To me it’s the biggest factor that allows us to be able to let go and to renounce.
We need less. We literally need less. When I have enough inside here, I need less, no question about it.
I don't need to fly wherever on EasyJet to lie on a beach, even if work is busy. I know this is sensitive
and everything. Sometimes the problem is, we don’t have, as humanity, collectively and individually,
we don't have those inner resources. The relationship with food, the relationship with entertainment, the
relationship with buying stuff to impress the neighbors or people at work or whatever. One becomes
less dependent on things needing to be convenient, needing to be comfortable, needing to have some
kind of sense pleasure keeping coming at me. Also less dependent on having the sense of security so
much. This is all really at the heart, I see, of what will enable us as a species to make the shift or not. I
don’t know if that’s overstating it; maybe it is. And this sense of inner reservoir I think is massive. The
heart, also, as we develop this slowly, slowly, slowly, really over a lifetime, we actually become more
capable of goodness, we become more available to others, because we have enough. So, the whole idea
of renunciation – what is it, reduce, reuse, recycle – is not scary. It’s just not scary.
So having generosity as a basis, that attitude of generosity and openness and kind of giving as a basic
part of our impulse to practice is really important. Another piece that is really important is what I call
taking care of the heart. We could say that's what practice is, taking care of the heart, and from the
beginning to the end we are really taking care of the heart in a very deep way. That's what practice
means.
Someone asked the Buddha once, "Okay, Samatha sounds great. What does it depend on? What are the
causes for Samatha and Samadhi arising?", and he said "The most important thing is happiness." Which
sounds odd. We just said that Samatha leads to happiness, but actually also depends on happiness. It
depends on a certain foundational level of sense of well-being.
So, I'm going to put something out now, and I hope that you will remind yourselves of it periodically
through this retreat, and that is to incline the heart, and incline the mind towards appreciation, just
whenever you remember to do that. By that I mean reflecting, for instance, on everything that
supported you in being here for five days. Maybe someone is looking after some stuff at home for you.
Maybe someone helped you in some way, with work or whatever, just so you could be here. There are
eight managers here who work incredibly hard to support us all here. The staff members here. Reflect
on that as you are here, to allow a sense of appreciation and gratitude. Very significant. It's not a small
thing.
We want to nourish joy. We actually want to nourish joy, and we do that in a deliberate way. It's so easy
for human beings to focus on the negative, and it seems so compelling. You know, if you are here, the
food isn't that good, it's too crowded, and it's a full retreat and so on, whatever it is. And it seems so
compelling and so seductive, the complaining mind, even just a little bit. It seems so believable and so
true. So partly, what I want to suggest we all do is to just keep shifting that to a mode of appreciation,
of gratitude. Whatever it is that tunes you into that sense, drop it in periodically, especially when you
notice your mind slipping into grumbling mood. Samatha questions this whole tendency of being
infatuated with the negative. We will explore this much more.
Appreciation and gratitude. As part of that, being in nature. Take a period a day – if you can fit it in at a
mealtime, great. If you can't, take another period. Maybe a walking period even, and go for a walk.
Open the being to seeing, smelling, hearing, to nature, and the beauty of nature.
I'm also going to throw something else out right now, and that is to take a period of day for some
exercise. So that may be your walk. It may be that you do yoga or Chi Gong or Tai Chi or Qua Gong or
whatever. [laughs] Or some other Oriental thingy. [laughter] Do that thing. It's going to help in the
sense of the body and the body energy. So take a period, again, of walking or whatever, and do that. It’s
really helpful.
Okay. There will be interviews in the retreat, but these will almost exclusively be group interviews.
Originally, when I planned the retreat, I really thought eight people would show up, and I would be
working very individually with everyone, but that’s obviously not the case. There will be groups. But in
a way, on reflection, I actually feel that’s better, because there’s so much that we’re going to learn from
each other in this. You’ll see when you go to a group that there’s so much in common. Now, usually, on
a meditation retreat, and in interviews during a meditation retreat, it’s kind of “anything goes.”
Anything is okay to talk about. Anything that’s happening in your life, anything you’re struggling with,
anything that’s going on outside, et cetera. This retreat, what Chris and I really want to hear about is the
meditation. How is it going in terms of the body, the breath, and really as much as possible seeing if the
other stuff can be – just for now, as I said, it’s a different emphasis, a different approach; it’s not forever
– just a little bit put aside. Really what we’re interested in is the meditation. That’s what the interviews
are really about. Now, there’s something about this, about doing group interviews, especially with a
practice like this which is kind of, in a way, trying to develop something. That is the measuring mind
and the comparing mind, and the pain of that. This is a, unfortunately it’s a predominately Western
thing. Practicing in some Asian-type monasteries, it doesn’t really exist, this reticence of sort of… you
can be next to someone who is just way in a different place from you and it’s just okay, it’s just okay.
It’s partly a Western culture thing, and I’ll be talking a lot about this on the retreat. Is it possible that we
can kind of not give that fear of the measuring mind and the pain that might be there, if we can not give
that too much authority? We’re just there as human beings, in a group together, sisters and brothers in
aging, sickness and death, sharing what’s going on in our practice. So what if someone has done more
than us? So what if someone has done less? As much as possible, to encourage that, and also to
encourage in the groups to ask questions. You will have a lot of questions in this practice, or you should
have a lot of questions. I really want to encourage that questioning.
Okay. Just a few very brief practical things. Silence, which the managers already mentioned. Yeah,
silence. Just to say: this is an integral part of the practice. The Buddha says, “Dependent on seclusion.”
Usually we’re so full of stuff that comes to us through talking, which is beautiful, you know, the
communication we have through speech. But what would it be to not be so full of what’s coming from
other people, or not filling other people up with what’s coming from me? Just quieting, just quieting.
So this silence that we, in a way, undertake together, that we commit to together, that’s also an act of
generosity. We’re supporting each other’s practice by really committing to the silence. This can feel
odd at first – 60-whatever people together in silence, not talking to each other, sitting right next to each
other. Could it be that there’s another kind of strata of connection, feeling of connection, with people,
in and through the silence that’s there, that’s actually not about speaking? We can feel the life of those
around us, and sense that and sense the support, giving and receiving. And as the managers said, please,
please, the mobiles, which – unfortunately I’m realizing it’s quite common for people to leave their
mobiles on during the retreat, and to text, et cetera. Please, please don’t. There’s a real treasure here.
This stream of practice, this Samatha, all the tips I’m throwing out that basically I got from others for
the most part, there’s a treasure here. Don’t miss the treasure just because you want to send some texts
or you don’t want to shut off the communication. If there’s something that feels like you need to finish
business-wise – I’m aware it’s Friday night – just see if you can do it tonight, and then just give
yourself to the retreat, give yourself to the simplicity of being here, the simplicity of the schedule, just
kind of surrendering the being to that simplicity.
If you haven’t – or, rather, if you don’t feel yet like you’ve really arrived, take a little time tonight after
we finish in here and really just feel yourself arriving. Wander around the grounds, the front, the back.
It’s very beautiful. Just feel the body, the being, arrive here, just in the quietude, just being here, to
settle in.
Last practical thing. The ethical guidelines, the precepts, the five precepts. This really, I see, as a
gesture of love. It’s a movement of love, that we’re together, committing to these five precepts. A
gesture of respect and care to each other, for each other. To enable an atmosphere of trust, of relaxation,
enabling everyone to open, to let the guard down. It’s a gift to ourselves. We can let our guard down
when we abide, when we live by, those ethical guidelines, and we allow others to do so. That openness
that that allows, that openness is a huge part of Samatha. It’s a huge part of the mind deepening.

2: 2008-08-09 First Morning Instructions and Guided Meditation

Okay. So this morning what I’d like to do is do a guided meditation together. And then at the end of the
session this morning kind of recap some of the main points I want you to take through the day.

[guided meditation begins]

Really finding a – settling in to a posture that’s comfortable. Again, the important thing about the
posture is this kind of balance, inclusiveness of uprightness, so the posture is reflecting a wakefulness
and alertness. That quality is balanced with a sense of openness in the body, of softness, if possible,
particularly in the chest area. The body reflecting that balance, which is also the ideal balance in the
mind. So the body is upright, open, soft, relaxed.

Taking a moment to feel in to how the face feels right now. Just noticing any obvious areas of tension,
perhaps around the eyes, the mouth, the jaw. Just feeling in, seeing if it’s possible to relax them right
now. Just letting go, as much as you can – not a problem if it doesn’t all go. Feeling in to the throat and
the neck, and again just relaxing, relaxing. The shoulders, allowing them to move towards the floor, to
drop down. The upper back, just feeling in, sensing in, relaxing. The chest, the chest area. The
abdomen, the belly, and in particular the lower belly, allowing it to hang down towards the floor.

Then opening the awareness to the sense of the body, right here, right now. So just checking in with the
sensations of contact, of sitting, the buttocks, the feet, the legs making contact with the cushion, the
chair, the floor. Just receiving those sensations in awareness. Connecting with those simple sensations.
Then opening the awareness, filling the body with awareness, permeating the body with awareness.
Like air fills a balloon. Just feeling in to the sense of the body, the texture of the body, the texture of
that area that we call the body. Just a global sense of it. Tuning in. A sensitivity to the whole body.

Within that, just lightly becoming aware of the breathing. Keeping the awareness large. When you’re
ready, beginning to take some long, slow in breaths, long, slow out breaths. Comfortably long. So
you’re not forcing the breath; you’re allowing it to really open and expand. If you have a blocked nose
or a cold, fine to breathe through the mouth. Not necessarily moving a lot of air, but just lengthening,
slowing down the breathing, filling the body with the energy of the breath.

Then tuning in, seeing if you can notice, if you can feel in to the whole body expanding, the whole
body expanding with the in breath. Reversing that expansion with the out breath. Just feeling in to that,
throughout the body. How does that feel? You may also be aware, perhaps, of a sense of the whole
body being energized, feeling energized as the breath comes in. The sense of the body being energized.
And as the breath goes out, there is a natural letting go, a natural relaxation that happens. So expanding,
energizing with the in breath; contracting, relaxing, letting go with the out breath. Just tuning in, in the
whole body, to whatever feels the most helpful of all of that to connect with right now. Whatever is
most helpful for you. Keeping the breath long, keeping the awareness large.

Now, keeping the breath long and slow, and keeping that whole body awareness, the awareness
stretched to fill the whole body, seeing if you can notice – and maybe you can notice, maybe not, and
it’s fine either way – how does it feel up the front of the body when the breath comes in? So perhaps
you notice something there, perhaps not, and it’s really fine either way. Keeping a delicate touch of
awareness, very light awareness in the whole body, how does it feel up the torso as the breath comes in
and goes out?

What do you notice in the throat area and the face as the breath comes in and goes out? So whole body
awareness, a very light, sensitive awareness to the whole body. Perhaps you notice something in certain
areas, and perhaps not, and it’s really fine. Tuning in to what’s helpful, just noticing.

Keeping the breath long, keeping the awareness large, how does it feel up the spine as the breath comes
in and out? Up the back. Perhaps you notice something, perhaps not. Just lightly, delicately tuning in, in
the whole body.

How does it feel in the legs as the breath comes in and out? So really including the legs in this whole
body awareness, the whole body.

Now, perhaps you notice some movement of energy in different areas of the body, perhaps not. It really
doesn’t matter. But tuning in to whatever is helpful. The whole body expanding and contracting, the
whole body being energized, or certain movements, the whole body relaxing with the out breath.
Whatever in there feels helpful, feels good, feels connecting, just tuning in to that.

Still keeping this wide awareness, this large awareness, allowing yourself to play and experiment with
the breath. So seeing if you can get a sense, allow yourself to play – what kind of breath feels best right
now? Feels most comfortable? How does the body want to breathe? Keeping a large awareness, does
the breath want to stay long? Or to be shorter, or to be even much shorter? Does it want to be smooth or
rough? What feels best right now? So really allowing yourself to play with it, to make it the most
comfortable it can be. Not just falling back on the default, unconscious way of breathing, but really
engaging, playing with the breath like a child would play with plasticine. Really feeling into what feels
best. A strong breath or a subtle breath? This will change. Keeping responsive, keep playing in that
large awareness. Just encouraging the breath and the body to feel just as good as they can, right now,
how ever that is.

Just seeing if you can get a sense of what the body needs in this moment, and giving it that with the
breath, or through the breath. You can use the breath to open the body, breathing in a way that opens up
the body. Or you can breathe in a way that energizes the whole body. If it feels needed, you can breathe
in a way that soothes the body, and feel that soothing. You can bathe the body with the breath. You can
calm the body with the breath. Feel the breath as calming, and find a breath that’s calming. See what
does the body need right now, and see if you can respond through the breath and feel that. Whole body
awareness.

So you’re nourishing the body with the breath energy, nourishing the energy of the body with the
energy of the breath, in whatever way feels best. Playing with that. The awareness fills the body, and
seeing if that awareness can be really close, really alive and bright. So not so much an awareness
looking at the body, but awareness in the body, permeating the body, really putting the awareness inside
the body to fill the body as much as possible. Really being alive to the texture of the body area, the
feeling of the body area.

Breathing in a way that allows the body to feel comfortable, as comfortable as possible. It may be that
somewhere in the body, some area, could be anywhere, feels a little bit comfortable right now. There’s
a comfortable spot, a place of ease or warmth or openness or pleasant feeling. Some place that one is
actually enjoying this breathing, this body. Really including that in the awareness. If you want, actually
centering the awareness in that place and knowing that place, feeling that comfort, knowing the whole
body from that place. Even if it’s not remarkable at all, just – it doesn’t have to be anything particularly
special; just some place of relative comfort and ease, it feels okay, it feels nice. Any place in the body.
Just connecting with it, opening to it, feeling whatever degree of comfort there is. Tuning in to that.
Nourishing that sense with the way you breathe and your playing with the breath.

Is it possible that whatever place of comfort, spot of comfort, ease, areas of even pleasure – is it
possible that that can spread a little bit? Through the way you’re playing with the breath, the way
you’re breathing. It’s okay if not. You can just stay with that one place, and just tune in to the comfort
there.

[guided meditation ends]

Okay, so that’s quite a lot of stuff already. I want to do a little recap. We’re playing with the breath, but
we’re not putting a lot of forcing into that. You’re not yanking the breath either to be subtle or to be
short or to be long. We’re not putting a lot of physical pressure on the breath. Sometimes it’s actually
just a sense of questioning, “What would it feel like right now, what would happen, if the next breath
were a bit longer or a bit shorter or a bit stronger or a bit more refined?” It’s almost like just dropping
the question in, and that question allows the breath to move. It allows that possibility to open up and
the breath to move in that way. As I said, you can sense in – what’s needed right now in the body, in the
energetic system? You can use the breath to open the body, really get a sense of the body opening, or
energizing, especially if there’s sluggishness and tiredness around, you can actually use the breath to
energize the whole system. Oftentimes, long, slow, deep breathing is actually very energizing. You can
use the breath to soothe, if you feel agitated. Breathe in a way that the breath is just really soothing the
whole system. Find out what this is. We all need to find out what this is for ourselves. We can breathe
in a way that we’re just bathing the whole system, calming the whole system, and just really feeling
that.

This word “play” that I mentioned last night is absolutely key. Play and patience. We’re really playing
with the breath. And something else I also mentioned last night – to let go of preconceived notions just
as much as you can of what the breath should feel like. Maybe one is breathing and there’s currents of
energy moving down the legs. Maybe. I’m totally happy with that. Maybe it moves up the legs. I’m
happy with that, too. Maybe it feels like it’s coming in somehow and moving down or up the whole
body. Who knows? See if you can just let go of preconceptions, and within that, where we should feel
it. The whole body breathes. It’s not just the nose and the mouth and the lungs. The whole body is
actually breathing. One might feel that anywhere or everywhere. So really want to listen, to really tune
in to the breath in the body and this experience. Really in an open way, as open as possible.

Through this playing with the breath, we allow the breath and the breathing to become more
comfortable. We’re allowing, we’re interested in nurturing this sense of comfort. So this question,
“What actually feels best right now?” It’s a very alive process. For me, implicit in the word “play” is an
aliveness. One is very alive to what does feel best right now, how does that feel. There’s a checking in,
a real feeling in. Now, we can manipulate too much. You can be over-involved sometimes. Or you can
be under-involved sometimes. Or you can be just right. But there’s no rule with this; it’s not fixed. One
really, really important thing is don’t fear mistakes with this. Don’t think, “Am I doing it too much, am
I not doing it enough?” Play, play, play, play. Don’t worry about this. You’re going to make mistakes;
we’re all making mistakes. That’s not a problem, that’s how we learn. Don’t fear mistakes.

It could be that in the course of playing with the breath and whole body awareness that some area of the
body, could be the belly, could be around the face, could be the chest, could be anywhere, feels a little
bit comfortable. Maybe a lot comfortable. Maybe just a little bit, just okay, easeful, really nothing to
write home about necessarily. Could be pleasure, could be ease, could be warmth, enjoyment in some
way. Using the breath to support and nourish, to kind of nurture that sense of comfort, how ever it is.
Allowing the mind to really connect with that sense of comfort, that sense of ease, as much as you can.
It’s the consistency of attention with the area of comfort that allows it to grow. We’re not putting
pressure on it. That’s also really important. We think, “Well, this comfort is not that comfortable. It’s
okay.” Don’t put pressure on it. Just be with what is there, and keep it relaxed. Keep that spot of
comfort relaxed. Slowly, slowly, one is nurturing it, and a sense of fullness can come from that, and
moving towards allowing that to spread and begin to fill the body. So it’s really important to enjoy and
be contented with – this is really, really important – enjoy and be contented with whatever you have
that feels good or okay or a little bit pleasant. We can always, the mind can always go, “Well, it’s not
good enough. It’s not strong enough.” Really see if you can develop a sense of contentment with it.
Inclining the awareness towards what does feel okay, what does feel pleasant. If we don’t do that, the
mind gets quite tense and unhappy. So this is very skillful to incline towards the pleasant and the
comfortable.

Now, we are, in the course of the days, moving towards nurturing, nourishing, in a very gentle way, that
sense of comfort. And moving towards having that sense of comfort spread and permeate the whole
body. This is a very gradual process. So usually we have to just stay with that one spot where it feels
okay, and just enjoy that, allow ourselves to enjoy it before trying to spread it. Usually. There are
actually no rules with this, but usually we need to stay with what’s there that feels okay, and then we
can move to spread it. When it feels more solid – and this is, I’m talking ahead a little bit for many of
us – but when it begins to feel more solid, more steady, then perhaps we can allow it to spread and fill
the body.

3: 2008-08-09 Talk Two: Understanding the Heart

One of my teachers, Ajahn Geoff, once remarked: "It's a sad irony, in a way, it's a sad irony that as
human beings, as a species, there's an awful lot that we understand, that we have the capacity to
understand, to discover, find out, and yet the thing that we most need to understand - we don't." That
thing is, in Pali, the citta, the mind, the heart. In English, we have two words, the mind and the heart. In
Sanskrit and Pali it's one word, citta. And we don't understand that, usually. We don't understand how to
take care, really deeply, and completely, for the heart, for the mind. How to take care of the mind and
the heart.
So this practice that we're doing together for five days, I want to really put it in a context, I want to just
take a little bit of time and put it in a context. In a way, the whole of practice is taking care of the mind,
is understanding the mind and the heart, and that's really fundamental to what we're doing, it's part of -
it's THE thing that we're doing. And there's a kind of overview that I want to paint a picture of. This is
one strand, one aspect within that overview, one aspect of the path.
So, if we take a very broad picture of the path, what do we have? We have mindfulness, and this is
perhaps the aspect of the path that most people are familiar with - awareness, being with what is, being
open and in touch with what's going on, in a kind of very straight-forward, simple, connected way. And
that's an absolutely indispensable, fundamental part of the path. So, am I able to be both with what is
lovely in life and also with what is challenging, what's challenging in the body, what's challenging in
the heart and the mind in relationship, am I able to actually touch that and open to it with awareness,
meet it directly? Crucial. That is one aspect of the path.
Another aspect is what we might call cultivation - this is huge. It encompasses a whole breadth of
factors and qualities that the Buddha encouraged us very strongly to cultivate. So, generosity and ethics
and mindfulness and samatha is one of them, and equanimity and loving-kindness, compassion, the list
goes on and on and on. More than 37 of them. And that whole process of cultivation, actually being
really interested in that cultivation, really learning how to cultivate these qualities. Why? Because they
lead us both to happiness and to freedom. All those qualities that the Buddha encouraged us to cultivate
lead us both to happiness and to freedom.
So mindfulness, cultivation, of which samatha is part and the last one is what you might call insight,
but specifically insight into dukkha, into suffering. Meaning insight into any sense of dis-ease. Insight
meaning looking into it in a way that brings understanding, so that a sense of release comes. So insight
that brings this sense of "Ah! The suffering is draining away to some degree, or completely." That's
what's called insight. Understanding suffering that drains the suffering out of it. Understanding
suffering in a way that drains the suffering out of it. So understanding what it is that gives rise to
suffering. Not just intellectually, completely in the being, understanding what it is that supports
suffering, and what it is that can release that suffering.
And these three together, mindfulness, cultivation, this kind of insight, understanding, make up the
path, very broad picture. So when, in teachings, we talk a lot about suffering etc., understanding
suffering, as the Buddha placed great emphasis on that, all of those are actually included in that. All of
those aspects are included in working with what's difficult. So, sadness, grief, fear, anger, difficulty in
relationship, illness, the aging process, dying - all these, in order to meet all that and see through it in a
way that brings freedom, needs mindfulness, needs the whole gamut of cultivation, and it also needs
this kind of penetrative understanding of what is it that gives rise to suffering in the moment, and what
is it that can release that. All of that's involved.
Part of all this, and part of kind of understanding the heart, if we might say that, is actually also
understanding happiness. Understanding happiness. That's really, really an indispensable part of being a
human being, I think.
Happiness is a funny word, it really pushes some people's buttons, it really rubs them the wrong way.
So substitute whatever word works for you. Happiness, joy, well-being, feeling groovy. (laughs)
Whatever it is. It doesn't really matter.
Samatha, as I said last night, samatha leads to happiness. We're very clear about that. Slowly, slowly,
long-term, in not a linear way, we're building this happiness. And, as I also, I think, said last night,
happiness is actually also a basis for samatha. So it works both ways, and a lot of things in the Dharma
build each other. They're reciprocally, they're mutually reinforcing.
Happiness is crucial. We talk a lot in the Dharma and, you know, myself and others, of course, as
teachers - "Let go, just let go." And sometimes, I feel it's a little ridiculous for me to say that. A person
is struggling and doesn't have a lot of sense of inner resource at that time. And one just says, "Oh, let
go." How are they gonna let go? You're hanging off a cliff and there's nothing there. And that person
just says, "Let go." Like that's a really good idea. (laughs) You have to be... It sounds good, and part of
the reason it sounds good is because it sounds really simple. And we love the [art of simple.] Don't
have to think about it. But does it work? Does it actually work? Now, sometimes it will work. Other
times, we need this foundation, this inner reservoir of well-being as a resource to have some leverage
with which to let go.
So a basis of happiness, I want to go a little bit into this tonight. Through cultivation, this is, as I said,
why the Buddha went on and on about all these lists, these boring Buddhist lists, it's because they lead
to happiness, partly. So. Some of these I mentioned last night, I want to draw them out a little bit more.
Generosity, this word dana, generosity, means the whole range of giving, of the open heart that gives.
Somewhere in the texts it says, when your meditation feels dry, when you feel discouraged, recall
moments and acts of your generosity. Recall moments and acts and times when you acted generously.
And the text goes [on] to say, what this does, is it brings into the moment, it encourages and nourishes
in the moment a sense of self-esteem. Actually, an important factor in the path is self-esteem, we want
to encourage that. It brings that into the moment. It brings, it allows a sense of warmth into the heart.
Also a really important factor. It brings a sense of encouragement etc.
So that's what the texts say. But then it's obvious that, well, we need some moments of generosity to
recall, clearly. So it's important that we're actually practicing generosity in our lives. That that's really a
practice that's alive for us. It's, again, something that we're playing with, that we're experimenting with:
what happens when I'm generous, how does it feel? What effect does it have on my relationships, on
my heart, on my sight, on my mind, on my world, on my meditation practice? We need those
memories, and we also need fresh... we need fresh memories. I can't, you know, if I'm recalling that
moment of generosity, sort of, very fuzzy, in the recesses of sort of, you know, the last millennium or
whatever... We need them to be fresh. That means, it needs to be alive, this practice of generosity. A lot
of times, at the end of retreat, it's a very normal question, a person says, "Great, that was really useful"
- well, some people say that - "That was really useful, what I learned in meditation, how can I take this
back into the world?" And that's a really important question, and at the end of retreats we speak about
that. And even before that. But the reverse question is also true. Am I bringing what's good from my
life into my meditation? Am I bringing the good qualities that I'm taking care of and nurturing in my
life, am I bringing those into the meditation in a way that's really helpful? So oftentimes, what we bring
in is unfortunately the not so helpful stuff. But can I, again, incline the awareness on actually bringing,
in a sense, recalling goodness, recalling generosity, what's really helpful?
I'm not sure, but I think most people, probably most people here, just a guess, are familiar with the
notion that emotions and memories and hurt are stored in the body, in the cells, in the musculature etc.
And negative emotions, negative memories, hurts etc. can kind of be stored in a way that actually
closes the body and cramps the body and can cause these constrictions in the body, in some cases
illnesses etc. And we need to kind of release that and there can be a process of healing and catharsis.
And - great, OK, I'll come back to this, but that's fine.
If that's true, it's... What about, again, investigating the opposite? And this is really something we can
investigate. What happens to the sense of the body when I act generously? This is something to
experiment in our lives, what happens when I give? When I give a lot, that actually, I feel something
opening. We can actually feel this. We give something as a, just a spontaneous giving, or even in a not
spontaneous giving, and you actually feel the heart open, and you actually feel, again, if there's a
sensitivity there, you'll feel, the body will feel lighter. There will be a lightness and an openness in the
body. That lightness and openness is totally helpful for this practice of samatha. Can you see that we're
working a lot with the body energies and opening them and having them be enjoyable, so what we're
doing in the life is feeding that. It's not just working with the body in terms of releasing the negative.
We can actually shape the texture of this energetic space. We shape the texture of this energetic space
with our intentions and our acts, and our speech etc. So, I don't know if that sounds far-fetched or not,
but [I'm] offering it as something to really enquire into and to experiment in our life. So there's
generosity as a part of cultivation.
I also touched briefly last night on ethics and what's called Sila. And again, this allows, this nurtures a
sense of self-respect, which is really, really important - these are not irrelevant, sort of un-spiritual
attitudes, self-esteem and self-respect. If I'm living in a way that's caring to others, caring about what
I'm putting out etc., caring about the vibration that goes out and the effect that goes out, I have to worry
less, I worry less about what I might get found out about. You know, there was that little cheating on
my tax return or whatever it is, or I said something behind someone's back and they might find out.
There's just less worrying. We come to the meditation - "Ah!" - unburdened. Without regrets. Also
without the need of pushing a part of our mind, kind of sweeping it under the rug because actually we
don't really want to look at that. And that allows calmness, that allows openness. So we can also, in a
way, see this ethics, see this Sila as a kind of, a generosity, giving of security to others. People get the
sense that they can trust us. People get a sense that, around us, they can let down their guard. That's a
beautiful gift to give someone. It's a beautiful gift. And one can feel it. If you can't feel it over a while...
Knowing someone, you get the sense, "This is, I can just, mh, I don't need to worry here." How lovely
to give that.
There's generosity, there's Sila. In the texts, they talk about, or the Buddha talked a lot about what's
called restraint of the senses, or guarding of the senses, as sort of something to develop on the way to
the mind kind of concentrating, calming down. So this is a really interesting one. Sometimes on retreats
you will notice people sort of shuffling around, looking at the floor a lot. I... That's OK, but I've... I
don't tend to teach that way, and actually most of the people at Gaia House don't tend to teach that way.
Eye contact is fine here, I don't know if, maybe some of you have been wondering, I'm not sure. But it's
fine to look around you. It's fine to make eye contact, it's fine to smile even, actually. (laughs) We want
a connection to be there. We want... Who are these people who I'm living and practicing with and being
supported by and supporting? Who are they? Can the heart connect through the eyes? Now, I might
smile and not get anything back. So I have to kind of watch what I'm going out with, and that's actually
more interesting. Am I going out through the senses with hunger, because that's what the Buddha's
talking about. He's not talking about sort of living in a cardboard box or anything like that. He's talking
about being careful, when I'm going out through the looking, through the hearing, through whatever,
with a sense of wanting to distract myself, wanting to fill up. Being hungry. Actually, can I go out with
a sense of wanting to connect? With a sense of kindness, appreciation? So, partly, what I said today
about the weather etc., that also has to do with what's happening with the senses and the relationship,
our relationship with the senses and how that affects the heart. This is all such an interesting area to
experiment with, and rather than saying, "No eye contact, no smiling", or even, "You have to go round
greeting everyone", or whatever, it's actually just to experiment with this. What effect, what resonance
does it set up in the heart? So, generosity, ethics, Sila, this kind of awareness of our movement with the
senses, just an interest in that movement in the senses.
There's one more that I'd like to mention, and I'm actually gonna go into it much more fully, probably
tomorrow night, and it's our orientation or attitude to practice in terms of notions and concepts like
success, progress, goals, effort. That, I would actually say, is really key in terms of setting up an
atmosphere, a basis of happiness. If that's not right, if [we've] got a very strained and painful
relationship with those kind of notions of progress, of success, whatever that might mean in practice, of
efforting, of goals, that's really gonna, it's kind of like having one foot in a, you know, one of those
traps that catches animals. Right from the start, there's something really [inaudible], we kind of have to
repress that whole side, that whole notion of practice. This is actually huge, and that's why I'm gonna
actually devote a bit more time to it tomorrow.
So sometimes we can have, we can either hear or read or have a notion that we gravitate towards about
practice. "Just be in the present, just be. Just be in the present, allow. Allow whatever's there. And
there's no such thing as progress, there's nowhere to get to." Now that might be, what to say, a mode of
practice that we pick up from time to time, and it can be a very helpful mode of practice. But as a
summary of what practice is, it's way too small, it really doesn't do justice to our own aspirations, or to
the fullness of what the path is. And the Buddha never, ever, ever taught that way, absolutely not. So,
the Buddha uses language like "path", and "path going towards the goal", and uses quite, uses that
language a lot. A path is what goes somewhere, and we want to move towards the goal. Something in
our relationship to that kind of idea and concept we have to get right in order for there to be joy and
happiness in our practice and in our path. It's crucial, and that's actually huge, it's a big potential, well,
sometimes stumbling block, but issue, I think, for us in the West now, as Dharma practitioners, and I'll
talk about that tomorrow, I think.
But there is progress in the path. We can talk about progress. Progress in terms of what we're
developing. We're developing more generosity, developing more loving-kindness, developing more
well-being, more samatha, more etc. We're developing what we're able to see in the present moment.
Actually, the seeing becomes more subtle, slowly and slowly, over time, our seeing becomes more
subtle, our awareness becomes more subtle. We see more, no question about it. We develop in what we
can actually understand in the present moment. So, our understanding, our Pañña, our wisdom,
develops. And we develop what we're able to let go of in the present moment. Something that today
feels impossibly difficult to let go of, time goes by in practice, we work at our practice, we develop our
practice, we're able to let go of that thing. Some things we're clinging to today, and we don't even know
that we're clinging to. It's too subtle, it's below the level of awareness. That's why we need to develop
our subtlety of seeing as well. And we begin to let go of things that today we have no clue we're even
holding on to, but it's going on.
So, a concept like success implies, by the nature of the duality of concepts and the relativity of
concepts, it implies failure, it implies its opposite, just as the left-hand side of a stick implies a right-
hand side of a stick. That's true. But we don't need to throw out the whole thing necessarily, at least
certainly not right now. What's hanging us up here? It's often the fear. It's fear that a notion of success
might put me in touch with a sense of failure and then a fear, actually, that my self-view will then wrap
around and identify with failure. That's the fear, that's one of the key fears there. And it can have such
power, such immense power in our lives. So we just say, "I won't think about progress, I won't think
about success, because I don't want to go near that other pain. I don't want to invite that other pain." I
don't want to get too much into that now, I'll talk tomorrow about that.
So, samatha, samadhi gradually, slowly, non-linearly, leads to happiness, well-being, joy, whatever
your word is. How? Well, this comfortable feeling that I introduced as something to begin to notice this
morning, that comfortable feeling, however humble it might be, really nothing to start writing a post-
card back to wherever about, "Hey, guess what, I just..." However humble it is, we nurture that through
the practice of samatha, that's what we're doing, we nurture that, we're nourishing that... And you can
think of this a little bit, if you want, like lighting a fire. And so one has just some kindling, it's very
small at first, and at first the fire's very fragile, and perhaps you have to blow on it to kind of get it
going - we can't blow too hard. And then later it builds, but one maybe needs to protect it from the
wind. So what do I need to do to nurture this fire, this little flame, what's really a kindling, a flame, and
develop that, let that build into a fire? And at different times, just as a fire, it's going to need different
approaches. Sometimes we're protecting it from the wind, sometimes we're more than happy with the
wind, with a huge fire, the wind will (whooshing noise) - take it. So we need to be sensitive, like, how
am I tending this flame, and letting it build, allowing it to build, encouraging it to build?
Now, I can say that and we can point in that direction of well-being, of happiness, but often what we
find, of course, is not that. Is, it's not in our experience, and that's completely OK and just part of being
a meditator. So, one of the most common things that a meditator will experience is what's called the
five hindrances, some of you will be familiar with this and some less so. They're very common states of
mind that present as difficulties and obstacles in the meditative process. The two most common ones
are what's called sloth and torpor, which I think is like a, you know, from Chaucer or something, it's
really old English, but uh... Sloth and torpor, it means sleepiness, dullness, fogginess, drowsiness, that
kind of mind. And the other one is restlessness. Now, I think last year on the retreat I gave a whole talk
devoted just to the hindrances. This year I'm actually going to say a bit less about it and what I want to
emphasize this time is really working with the breath through the hindrances.
So. When there's sleepiness, when there's that kind of dullness and fogginess and you might find
yourself nodding, first thing, actually, is just to re-establish the uprightness of the posture. So, the body
wants to curve over like that, actually re-establish - it's upright and open. It wants to snuggle in and do
that... Open, upright, re-establish that. But then I would say, see if you can work with the breath, and
the long breath that we started with is actually really helpful. When you're next to someone, either in
bed or in the meditation hall, who's actually sleeping, listen to their breathing. (short breathing noises,
getting louder) (laughs) She's making me [inaudible] (laughs) It's a very short, heavy out-breath, is very
common, especially in a shallow kind of sleep, which is thankfully the only thing most people get into
in meditation. Although I've actually been giving a talk where people started snoring. What you want to
do is shift the breath, encourage the breath, yank, if necessary, but that's definitely a second option, into
the long breath. You're energizing the body through the breath. You really, when we take in breath
energy, we're energizing, we're oxygenating the blood, whatever way you want to look at it. Really long
and filling the body with that breath energy. The mind rests on that energy and it will brighten. Keep it
up, you know, five, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, as long as it needs. It can also be helpful if you got
visual imagination to imagine a really bright, white light. Like the sun, golden white light, right in the
middle of your head, if you can do that, with the long breathing. Just really bright. You know, shine out
the cobwebs in the mind. If you need to open the eyes and take in a sense of space, when the mind goes
to sleep and huddle, it kind of... actually, when we go to sleep at night, the mind and the body huddle
up on themselves. And they shrink on themselves. Again, we want to reverse that process, want to be
quite active with this. Not just giving in to it. So open, take in a sense of space, this is a big room, a lot
of space in it, open the eyes, take in the sense of space. And if it's really strong, stand up and meditate
standing up. Not a problem at all, eyes closed, eyes open, no problem. If you're still sleepy when you
do the walking meditation, really walk quite fast up and down. [If] that's no good, make sure you're
getting some exercise in the day. Go for a brisk walk etc., or even a run, if you need to. If none of that
works, nap time is what's needed, OK. So, that's very, very, common, and it's going to be around from
time to time, but [I'm] really encouraging you to work actively with it.
Restlessness, the other one. The other most common one. Spacious, I've got to say, with the sleepiness
as well, the mind goes in, so, also just sometimes bringing out the whole body again, re-establishing
that whole body awareness. Also helpful with restlessness is a sense of spaciousness. So, really
establishing that space and just sort of letting things be a bit in that space. Sometimes we squeeze the
mind too tight, too efforted, and that actually creates restlessness. It's coming out of good intention, but
we're just trying too hard and it's creating restlessness. So I think I just dropped it in this morning at
some point, sometimes you can use the stillness and the silence that's in the room to kind of... as a
support for calmness, as I said, you can relax into that stillness and silence in the room, and that just
helps soften and relax out the restlessness.
So those are the two most common ones. There are three more. Greed, or... greed. Um... (laughs)
Aversion, and doubt. (pauses) I think actually what I'll do is, I'll talk about them tomorrow morning.
With these hindrances, golden rules, and again, I'll mention this tomorrow morning, so whatever they
are, is, first one is not to take it personally. Not to take them personally. They are factors of human
consciousness until we are completely awake and completely enlightened. So the fact that you feel dull
and drowsy, the fact that you feel restless or that there's greed going on or doubt going on, it's OK. All
it means is that you're human. It's just, it's not a big deal. See if you can just see it as just human, and
rather than a reflection of yourself as a failure as a meditator or an unspiritual person or whatever.
So that's one thing, not to take them personally. Second thing is not to get taken for a ride if possible.
So this is more common with doubt, greed, aversion, restlessness. Hindrances are almost like they, it's
as if the consciousness produces these little seeds of hindrances, just over and over and over, like,
almost constantly, these little seeds, and these little seeds have hooks in them, and they're looking for
something to sink their teeth into. (clicks teeth) And then they find that thing, whatever it is, and they
shake it up, and they make an issue out of it, and the next thing you know, this little seed has become a
huge oak tree with branches and proliferation and who knows what and it involves your whole life
story and your future and your mother and grandmother and... the whole deal. Don't... as much as
possible, this is part of the art of samatha, not to get taken for a ride. So this is what we learn slowly as
well, not to take them personally, not to get taken for a ride. Not to let them build so much, not to
believe so much what the hindrance is saying. Just to see, ah, this is greed, ah, this is doubt, ah, this is
restlessness. Just feel it as that unpleasant vibration, try and work with it. This is part of understanding
the mind, understanding the heart. This is really, it's a really important part of samatha practice. It's as
important as nurturing this comfortable feeling.
So, we notice hindrances, of course, sometimes. We also notice the body not feeling so good. Either
outright pain, discomfort, or just areas of the body that feel tight, constricted, blocked. So this is very,
very normal. Very normal. And will probably, again, go on until one's completely enlightened. Maybe
even after that because the body is a system that depends on too many different conditions. So, I will
talk about this tomorrow, but I just want to throw some things out there.
First thing, when there's pain, when there's a sense of constriction, relax, as much as possible, relax the
rest of the body. Again, usually when there's constriction or pain, the mind will shrink, the awareness
shrinks and gets smaller in reaction to that discomfort or constriction. Seeing if again just keep
establishing this wide spacious awareness, really important. The mind gets sucked like a magnet into
what's difficult. That's the tendency of most minds. And just to establish that more spacious awareness.
Sometimes you have a sense of constriction or block or discomfort somewhere in the body and another
part of the body feels OK or comfortable, even quite nice, sometimes. So, in this spaciousness, check
for that. And if that's the case, is it possible to stay more with the comfortable feeling? And not get so
pulled into the magnet of the discomfort. And then maybe let's say the belly feels good but it feels
blocked in the throat area. The belly feels quite comfortable. Maybe staying with the belly and you just,
in your mind, in your imagination, open up the connection between the blocked area and the good area.
Just don't try and do anything, just open up that connection. It's possible that the comfortable feeling
might begin to spread and wash over what's constricted. You can also play with the breath, we talked
about this. Playing with the breath to soothe the body if it feels that, or to open the body. Maybe to fill
the body with a sense of more well-being.
Sometimes you can move the breath through. Say, your knees are hurting, it's almost like the breath
comes in, can come in anywhere, tomorrow I'll introduce the breath coming in anywhere in the body,
not just through the nose. Breath coming in and, the breath energy can move through where it's painful.
Move through the throat constriction or whatever it is. You're actually imagining the energy moving
through. Don't be afraid to use your kinesthetic imagination. Tomorrow I'll talk about breathing into
pain, or into other areas of the body, breathing into... what is it to breathe into the knee? Or breathe into
the solar plexus. But to also notice, if there's fear around the pain, discomfort, is that actually increasing
it? Because it probably will. We're interested in insights here, we're interested in insights that bring a
sense of release. Just seeing, if I just relax that fear a little bit, is it possible that maybe some of the pain
ebbs away, or even all of it? And, you know, if that's too much, I'll talk more about it tomorrow, if it's
too much, just move. Slowly, quietly, just move.
So we're also interested in the impulses of the mind, the impulses. So, there's pain, but there's also
itches. And you're sitting in meditation and then suddenly the face feels itchy. And, of course, the
normal reaction is to just with the hand go out and just start scratching it. That's the kind of knee-jerk
reaction. But there's a lot here about watching the impulses of the mind and maybe not giving in to
them so readily. So the impulse to scratch an itch, at its core, is in some respects no different than the
impulse to yell at someone when we feel angry or punch someone even, or, in its extreme development,
the impulse to, you know, for a nation to go to war with another nation. (laughs) It's something, it's just
a movement of aversion that's not being understood, that's not being investigated and checked. There's
something we can learn with these seemingly insignificant movements that has everything to do with
when we're face to face with our partner, our boss, our colleague, another person, and we're really
angry, and there's something going on there, has everything to do with that. What we're learning here in
this samatha practice, just in terms of watching these impulses, not necessarily giving in to them.
Watching the mind as it wants to move out in an unhelpful way. So we practice with the easy things
first. When your partner is standing in front of you telling you how completely selfish and what a jerk
you are, it's hard, usually, to... An itch is, for most people, easier to deal with. Then, sometimes even
more subtly, the thought forming. You're in meditation, a thought's forming, and you say, "Oh, juicy,
let's follow this." It's the same movement, it's just not manifesting physically. Can we watch those
impulse, can we be interested in those impulses and see that it's not helpful to give in to them?
So this other thing, what I said a couple of minutes ago, when there's discomfort and pain, the mind
gets sucked in like a magnet there. That's also an impulse, it's a tendency of attention that most human
beings seem to have. And can we watch that and actually do something different and incline towards
well-being, towards pleasure, towards comfort?
Last night, I think, I introduced two words. Was it last night or this morning? Play and patience, two
words beginning with P. They're really important, and we continue with those concepts. Two more
words, this time beginning with S. (laughs) Steadiness and sensitivity. So, and particularly this word
sensitivity. That's really, really what we're interested in slowly developing in this practice. So there's a
real delicacy of awareness, a delicacy to our attention, a lightness to our attention. And with that
delicacy and lightness, there's an aliveness of presence. So when we're with this body area, we're alive
to the texture, we're alive to the vibration and how that feels, it's something in a very light way, it's not
clamping on it, it's not forcing on it, it's light and present and sensitive, and you can begin to get a feel
for this sense of sensitivity and begin to encourage and deepen that sense of sensitivity. So there's a
subtlety, also, of attentiveness. We slowly develop our subtlety of attentiveness. I'm sure you found at
some point today, that the mind will rebel. You say, "Be with the breath." - "I don't wanna be with the
breath." This is normal. "Stay with the breath." - "I don't wanna." And there's a sense of inner, kind of,
yeah, rebellion. Is it possible to soften, to relax the relationship with the body, with the breath? So it's
not a forcing and in a way one's just feeling into and sensing the body sense and hopefully just
whatever sense of the body's sense of well-being and just using the breath to just very gently nourish,
support that sense of well-being. If you go around [inaudible] you're relaxing into that, you're alive to
that, and you're just nourishing that, it's a much more relaxed way of going about it. Sometimes that's
the best thing. So really we're becoming sensitive to the present moment and particularly, like, how
we're engaging with the present moment, that's really what, actually what meditation practice is.
Sensitivity to the present moment. Particularly what we're doing in the present moment that may be
adding extra suffering. So, in our relationship with the practice, when am I, the way I'm going, is too
forceful or it's too pressured or too efforted or too harsh. That's unnecessary, and one becomes sensitive
to that and just able to kind of let go of that. So the way we're working is much more, is moving
towards more delicacy, it's almost like more finesse, is the word Ajahn Geoff used, finesse, there's a
sense of more and more finesse in the way how we're able to smooth out the sense in the body and
allow the mind to settle down, becomes a very delicate, sensitive process. And we get, develop more
finesse at smoothing out, kind of dissolving where there's difficulty and evaporating the sense of
difficulty.
During practice like this, there's something, it's already come up in a couple of the groups today, but it's
something that's very important and it will occur to you at some point. And it has to do with our
emotions and our emotional life and kind of particularly what needs addressing and what needs healing
and what needs being with emotionally. The question can occur, "Here I am, sitting and just keeping
[inaudible] of the breath and even more gravitating towards a sense of well-being, sense of comfort,
whatever that is, however that is... Is it possible that I'm actually repressing something that I need to be
with emotionally, that I'm actually in some kind of denial?" Well, the answer is yes, it is possible. It is
definitely possible. But there's more to this than meets the eye. I remember, twenty years ago or
something like that, a Dharma book that came out in the eighties and was written by a teacher, and one
of the lines in there said something like, "When I'm on a retreat and someone reports that they're
feeling good," the teacher said, "I feel suspicious. And I wonder, are they really in touch with all of
themselves?" Now, I understand that, but we could also just put the exact opposite question. Why not,
when someone's not feeling something good, are they, I wonder if they're not in touch with themselves.
It's very easy to land somewhere a little bit prematurely with this question. It's a very, very delicate and
complex question, so I want to tread lightly here. Sometimes we have a notion, as I mentioned before,
that things are stored in the body, in the system. Emotions, difficult emotion etc., kind of waiting to
come out. Some people view meditation practice as kind of just opening that process and things
emerge, and things emerge, and it's kind of a rough ride, but it's good for you. I'm not saying that's not
true, but the Buddha had another notion which is called dependent arising. And that means that things
come up because of factors in the present that kind of fabricate them and concoct them in the present.
So, what I'm asking, to go back to last night's talk, is that there's a real open-mindedness about this.
This is one strand, this samatha business is one strand of the whole range of practice, as I said at the
start of this talk, and we're just focusing on that for five days, not for the rest of one's life, not for the
rest of one's practice. It's just one particular emphasis to draw and explore that, which doesn't usually
get a lot of emphasis. So, in a Vipassana retreat, of course we say, can you be with the sadness, can you
be with the fear, can you explore it? We're exploring something else now, and there might be something
to learn here. And I just ask that there's an open-mindedness about this, just for five days.
Very recently, someone was on retreat here, on personal retreat, and doing Metta practice, but same
deal. Big body awareness, sensitive to the whole body, just Metta instead of breath, loving-kindness
meditation instead of breath. And a lot of heavy emotion, a lot of tears etc., and a lot of story coming
into that. And we were talking about working with the whole body and establishing that big body and
she came in for the next interview and said, "Well, that was very interesting. The tears were there, went
into that, get involved in the story, and then I remembered, oh yeah, went to the whole body, and they
stopped. They were just stopped." Immediately, [when] she established the whole body they would just
stop. And what's more, and this is very extreme, it's not usually that extreme, but she said, not only did
it stop, but all this joy started happening. And for her, she'd never experienced joy like this before, now
that's a very extreme example. But usually, a person doing samatha begins to notice, "Well hold on.
What's going on here in terms of emotions? It's almost like they turn on and they turn off." They turn
on and they turn off. The question is, is an emotion arising because it needs to? Because it's something
real? Or is it something that unwittingly, unconsciously the mind is, the heart is feeding in the moment?
It's feeding and it's fabricating it in the moment. This is a really, really important question, it's not an
easy question. And I'm aware that sometimes you suggest something like that it could be quite
controversial. But, just, have an open-mindedness. I would say that both views are useful. Both the
view of something being in there needing to come up and to release is useful, but also the opposite
view of "What's the mind doing in the moment to create something?"
Not doing very well for time. Are you still happy, relatively? Yeah? OK, I'll skip a little bit.
In terms of working with the breath, when there's an emotion, so I'm really just talking about one strand
of practice, remember that, can you work with the breath in a way that soothes that emotion? So, if it's
sadness, what might help the sadness? If it's fear, if it's anger, what way of breathing, a way of being
with the breath, might actually help that? It's not the whole of your practice for the rest of your life, it's
just exploring something else. There's something that can be learned here that's actually extremely
profound, and I would say, we don't fully understand our emotional life and our emotions until we've
seen both sides of this and we've seen it happening right here inside. See - able to be with things and
also being able to see this process of building and just stop building it. When is it just a hindrance sunk
its teeth into something, and its hooks into something and building something, when is it that and when
is it something else? And a question for us all, am I able to do both? Am I able to be with and open to
and connect with what's difficult emotionally? Can I do that? Am I courageous enough to do that? Do I
know how to do that? Am I free to do that? And, am I able to do the opposite? Put it down, encourage
well-being. Am I fearless enough to do that? Do I know how to do that? Am I free to do that? And if we
use the word "mature practice", mature practice is actually one that can move between these two. It's
quite a tall order, but it's possible.
So we have, as human beings, we have the story of ourselves, we have the narrative of our life and us
and what happened to us and what we have gone through and where we're going etc. What's the story
that we're telling ourselves about ourselves and about our life? This is important for us as human beings
and certainly as meditators. What's the story we tell about what's going on, about ourselves? The story
we tell ourselves is not a given, it's not a given and it's not necessarily fixed. You know, the Buddha,
reflecting on his life, he could have reflected, "Oh, my mom died when I was a week old, and my father
was really controlling." He wouldn't let him out of the palace, and [he] had a really over-controlling,
dominant father figure. "And then I had to run away from everyone and now I'm starving myself. But
actually even the people I was starving myself with didn't really understand me, so I have to go off on
my own. And it's really hard." (laughs) He didn't put it that way. To himself, he didn't put it that way.
Not a helpful way to put it. But all that stuff was actually true, to some degree. Rather, he talked in
different terms. He said, "This was the condition. And I saw someone who was old and sick, and a
dying person, and a mendicant, and it had this impression on me." And then that memory of samadhi,
when he was under the rose apple tree. And framing things in terms of what he called a noble quest. So,
are we framing our story in terms of nobility, in terms of a noble quest? Or framing it in terms of being
a victim? We actually have some say in this. This story is actually dependent, you'll notice, on the
mood that you're in, on the period of time that you're in... Is the story that we're telling ourselves, is it
leading to a sense of hope, of faith, a sense of possibility, or to the opposite? Is it encouraging a sense
of self-esteem? We have some say in this. Actually, the story is much more malleable than we might
think. Is the story that we're telling ourselves, is it keeping us circling in the past, bound in the past? Or
is it opening toward the future and possibility and creativity, potential? And, very importantly, are we
able to put it down? Are we able to put this story down?
So, the Buddha put his story down at times and picked up another lens to relate to things, called the
Four Noble Truths, and I'm not going to go into that now. It's a whole other way of looking at life and
experience. But he was able to put the story down. That's partly what we're doing - just come back to
the breath, we just come back to the breath. That sense of whatever well-being, putting the story down.
And it's not that we always want to put the story down. You know, sometimes this notion of being in
the Now, it's a little, kind of, overdone in spiritual circles. It's great to be in the Now, but it's not
everything. You know... I mean, it's nice and everything. (laughs) [But] it's not the be-all and end-all.
Sometimes, of course, we need to go into the - you need to actually reflect on the past to learn from the
past. You need to think about the future, of course you do that. And sometimes we pick up our story
because it gives meaning and direction to our lives, and a sense of purpose, actually in the story, and we
put it down. So, as the samatha deepens, slowly, gradually, non-linearly, there come times when there's
actually much less self, much less story going on, much less even sense of self. We're not building a
story over and over because we're not giving it that much attention, we're letting that go, letting that go,
letting that go... and there's much less sense of self around, this is part of where, I'll talk more about this
later in the retreat, part of where samatha and Insight interface and blend. Who am I when there's no
story present? When I'm not engaging and involved in my story, who am I then? Who am I?
Oftentimes, we define ourselves in terms of the story. Who am I when I'm not thinking? In those
moments when there's just - with the breath, with the sense of well-being, who am I then? Who am I -
as it goes deeper, for some people - the body begins to lose its sense of boundary and definition,
sometimes even dissolve. Who on Earth am I then, there's nothing but consciousness here! Sometimes,
as we let go of the ways we define ourselves, and that gets deeper and deeper, there can be fear. It's
very possible, there can be fear, at times, for some people, definitely. It's an acquired taste to be able to
let go, put these definitions down, it's an acquired taste. It comes with time. We learn to cherish that,
cherish the beauty and freedom of it. Something very lovely that, slowly, slowly, we get a taste of. And
it's a slow process, you don't have to rush this, you don't have to force yourself into this. Slowly, we get
a taste of this, and we fall in love with that sense of boundlessness and progressive, kind of, non-
defining. We actually fall in love with that.
So, there's a lot of healing in this. There's a tremendous amount of healing in this, all these aspects of
samatha that I'm talking about. You know, just the simple kind of resonating. We've got the body and
the breath, and there's a kind of, I'm talking about this energetic vibration in this body area, this global,
what some are calling [inaudible] bubble area of the body. All this behind, the whole thing, and that's
got a vibration, the mind is kind of, we're putting the mind close to it, and it starts resonating with it,
and there's a resonance of mind and body, and they come into harmony. That's very healing. Over time,
again and again, the mind and the body coming into resonance, very, very healing.
If we think about happiness, or whatever word, there's different kinds of happiness. This is really
important to notice in life, there are different kinds of happiness. So certainly, absolutely, there's what
we could call the happiness of sense pleasures. You know, great tastes, whatever. All that. A fantastic
meal, whatever it is. There is that happiness, for sure. There's the happiness we can actually have in and
through our story, if we're careful with it. If we're actually, you know, careful that the story isn't
spinning us into a vortex of negativity, and despair. There's happiness that comes from the story. There's
the happiness that comes from letting go of the story. There's a happiness that comes from non-
entanglement in the past and the future. There's a real happiness, there's a real beauty there. There's a
happiness or well-being or joy that comes from non-entanglement with the present. And in a way, that's
what we're doing here. We're not being - we're putting down the story, we're not getting entangled with
the past, the future, we're not getting entangled with the present, we're just inclining towards that
comfort, that well-being. That's not entangling, we're giving the mind something nice and open and
good. Slowly, slowly, it gives rise to more and more sense of well-being, and we nourish that, as I've
talked about. Comfortable feeling begins to grow and can begin to spread. And I think, it's important, I
think it's crucial for us as human beings to know the different kinds of happiness, because some are
actually more fulfilling than others. That's just the truth of it. Some happinesses, some joys, are more
profound than others. And we need to taste them, we need to be, in a way, interested in experiencing
them, because they are available to us. There's a story, a poem, that Rumi, the Sufi poet, tells of an
ocean frog, a frog that lives in the ocean, and he decides to visit the land one day and so he... whatever
frogs do. Hop. Hop? Yeah, he hops along, and he finds himself on the land, and he meets another frog.
And this other frog lives in a puddle. And the puddle frog says to the ocean frog, "Check out my
puddle, eh. You wanna splash around in there, it's really great, isn't it?" And so the ocean frog splashes
around in his puddle [and the puddle frog says], "What do you think, eh? It's fantastic!" And, "Yeah,
yeah, it's good." And then the puddle frog [says], "Where do you live?" And he says, "I live in
something called the ocean." And he's, "What's that like?" - "Well, you just kinda, I can't really explain,
you just kinda have to come and check it out."
This might sound crass, but what would it be if we really developed a practice like this? And most days
of our life... This is going to sound crass, but we'll... Most days of our life, the body and the being were
drenched in an exquisite happiness that wasn't dependent on anything from the outside, that wasn't
dependent on someone telling something to me or praising me or some sense pleasure, what difference
would that make to our life, that regularly, the being, the body were drenched in that kind of happiness?
How would that affect one's life? It would relativize a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff that we suffer over
would just seem like small fry. A lot of the social anxieties we have, what will people think of me, do I
appear OK, is it - dadadadada. It's because we don't have enough of a reservoir inside.
I'll share something with you I'm a little bit hesitant to say, but I do a lot of interviews. Sometimes,
people - not sure if it's a good idea to say this or not, but - sometimes, um (laughs) sometimes people
come into an interview and they're in a new relationship, and they share that with me, and they're very
happy about that. And I'm happy, too, for them. I am. (general laughter) But you know what? If
someone comes into an interview, and they tell me, "You know what? Regularly, in my meditation, I'm
getting this really nice feeling and this really nice joy, and it's quite a steady thing." And, you know, I'm
more happy for them. (laughs) Because it's more reliable, actually. It's more reliable. I mean, we know
about relationships, and... I'm not knocking relationships. (laughs) It's just that I know where reliable,
long-term happiness is. And when a person comes and reports that to me, I really feel like, OK, this
person has opened a door in their life, this is major. You know, it's not just something small. Once it's
steady, once it's regular, it totally - I'll talk more about this as the retreat goes on, but it really makes an
impact on life. Long-term and in a deep way, and it's much more reliable.
So, all of this is important, if we go right back to the beginning of the talk in a kind of overview. We're
just doing one strand for five days, we're focusing almost exclusively on one strand, just to really get to
know that strand. But the whole of practice is important, the mindfulness, the cultivation, the
investigation that lets go of suffering. Our ability to be with what's difficult, of course that's important.
We're focusing on something, or emphasizing the samatha approach for this retreat. But as we develop
a more independent sense of well-being in our life, just slowly, slowly, we develop that, our
relationship to suffering also begins to change. So instead of our relationship of just feeling
overwhelmed by suffering, or a knee-jerk reaction of just wanting to get away from it, or a kind of
desperation or desperate quality that comes into our relationship with suffering, we actually have
enough that we can turn and look at suffering with a sense of curiosity. And that makes a huge
difference for Insight, huge difference.
Now, there's also an immense way that samatha itself, in the way it unfolds, leads in itself to a deep
understanding, not just as a resource, not just as a way of clarifying and giving us a place from which to
look at suffering, but also in and of itself, and I'll go into that much more in the rest of the retreat.
So, all of this is there for us as practitioners. To re-iterate the other P word, patience. To really be
patient with all of this. Again, if I talk of drenching in happiness etc., I know that's - well, actually, for
some of you who have been here a while, old hands etc., that may be there today. But for most of you,
it's not. To be patient. And may well not be here on this retreat, that's fine. This is a very gradual
process. To be patient. It's not linear. It's gradual, in most cases it's slow, sometimes not. But to be
patient, and allow this, just gently nurture this path that is unfolding.
Let's sit together for just a minute.

4: 2008-08-10 Second Morning Instructions and Guided Meditation

OK, so just a little bit by way of review, and picking up some of the threads I put out last night, and
then we'll do a guided meditation.
Some of the really fundamental things not to forget. You will forget them, but to keep reinvigorating
them.

Whole body awareness. The awareness will keep shrinking, you just keep establishing it like air fills a
balloon, to fill the whole body. And within that, to be playing with the breath, to be experimenting with
the breath. Sometimes it can be quite a sort of involved experimentation, quite a lot of playing,
sometimes it can be very soft and sometimes it's best to actually not interfere with the breath at all. But
be careful of just letting things be and going into the default mode. That's not what we're necessarily
interested in. If you're not playing with the breath, let it be because that's really what feels good right
now. If it doesn't feel pretty good then play with the breath, see if you can make the body feel more
comfortable.

In that playing with the breath, not to neglect the long breath. Typically, as the retreat goes on, you may
need to feel like the body wants the long breath less. But don't neglect it. The default way of breathing
may be too shallow and not in a good way. So could be that the body wants a short breath, could be
long, but don't neglect the long breath, just check it out from time to time.
Long breath can be very energizing, can be very energizing. When we talk about Samadhi, it doesn't
just mean calm. It actually means a kind of calm balanced with energy, with energization. So as the
calm deepens, correspondingly our energy deepens, we're energized more. Calm on its own without
energy is bad, is dullness, is sleepiness. (2:22) Energy on its own without calm is restlessness, agitation,
something about a deepen together.

(2:32) Last night I threw out two more words: sensitivity and steadiness.

Sensitivity, it's a large word, it means quite a lot, but I feel it's a really important word. Begin to start
getting slowly a feel, recognizing, when the breath is maybe too long and it wants to be shorter. Or
when it's too short and it wants to be longer, or when it's too strong and it would be better for it to be
much more refined, much more gentle, much more subtle. Or it's too subtle and it needs to be a bit
more strong. Starting to get a feel for that, when the breath is too kind of active or when it's too kind of
sluggish. Just feeling into this sense and beginning to get a sensitivity for it. And to me that word
sensitivity implies a kind of real aliveness of the attention, so this area of what we're calling the body,
this area (3:34) of feeling, of vibration, we're really in an alive way feeling into that texture, a very light
delicate alive way.
So a lot of this stuff, it's not so much that you've got like a car manual, that "when this breaks down
look to see page 76" and then "ah, this is what I'll do". Sometimes it's like that, but there's much more
art involved, and that's partly where the sensitivity comes in, it's like just feeling, trying, experimenting,
getting a feel for it.

(4:12) This word, steadiness, as well. So in a way this has two aspects to it: a sensitivity, steadiness.
One is a more background steadiness, which is like, all this is going to have ups and downs. There's no
way that anyone in this room right now hasn't had plenty of ups and downs just in the day and a half
we've had so far of retreat. It's gonna be up and down. One part of the mind is very engaged with
responding to, playing with, seeing what works, and another part is just kind of neutral, non-attached,
spacious, observer of what's going on, kind of learning. It's not getting too ruffled by the ups and
downs. So that kind of steadiness.

The second meaning of the word steadiness, which is a steadiness of attention. So is it really possible to
be steady, to keep the attention steady with this bodily sense, steady with each breath coming in and out
and how that feels. And when there begins to be a comfortable feeling, however little that is, can we
really be steady and consistent with the attention towards that and the opening to it.

(5:30) Last night I talked very briefly about the experience sitting or walking or standing, whatever, of
some area or areas of the body that feel discomfort, pain, or even just a sense of constriction, of
tightness, of blocked energy, and this is going to be very common. Specially in its more subtle forms,
it's just something, the energy just doesn't "flow" there so well. So I want to go over 8 options.

1. Make sure the rest of the body is relaxed. We tend to tense up the rest of the body in relation to an
area of discomfort. Just open up the awareness and relax the rest of the body. Really important.

2. Make sure that the awareness is large. It will shrink, it shrinks when we don't like something
basically. We're like a porcupine or a turtle. They shrink. The awareness will do that. And just re-
establish it as large. There's something about having that whole-body awareness and the awareness is
filling the whole body like a big sheet that's spread over the body or a sail that's kind of following the
wind and it's spread over the body. And almost in that (7:05) bubble of awareness it gives everything
more context.

This is a real resource for our areas of pain. So we have a lot of chairs in this room, so we have the
possibility of alternating posture, but I would also encourage at this point sometimes actually working
with the pain, see what you can do with the breath and the awareness in relationship to pain sometimes.
Can you be up for that? And sometimes alternating. So both are included.

3. Staying with the area of comfort. No matter how weak or unremarkable this area of comfort is. The
mind gets pulled like a magnet into the discomfort, into the block, into the constrictions, the pain. And
we're kind of re-training the mind a little bit. Re-training the mind, just stay with the area of comfort,
not get so called. And in time, when we stay a little bit with that comfort, we can open up the sense of
this area of comfort, wherever it is, being somehow connected to an area of discomfort. And perhaps
just opening up that inner sense of comfort there's a connection actually does begin to flow and some of
the comfortable feelings can begin to spread towards, almost like they wash over the area of
constriction.

4. To play with the breath again. Is it possible that area of constriction, say it's in the upper back, can
you breathe, almost feel the energy of the breath soothing over the back in that way, soothing, soothing.
Or filling, sometimes when we fill the body with awareness, can you fill it with breath energy? That too
can be very helpful. A lot of things I'm throwing out, remember they'll be there in the recordings, I'm
totally fine with people taking notes, it's not a problem. Can we experiment with moving the breath
through a certain area? So, we may have a pain in the knee or the hip, can the breath move for instance
coming here and move right down the body through the area of discomfort and perhaps right out the
legs or out the fingertips? The breath energy is actually moving, don't be afraid to use your imagination,
it's not so much a visual imagination as a sort of feeling imagination, play with it.

Pain or constrictive or blocked energy (9:55) is exactly that, pain in energetic terms is blocked energy.
So you just imagine the energy moving through, feel it moving through. And sometimes, even in the
meditation, you can ask "what parts of my body" (even if you don't feel that bad), "what parts of the
body right now need, could do with some breath energy?". Maybe the legs are not getting it. Maybe the
arms are being left out, maybe the head is being left out. What parts need the breath energy? In a
minute, going to do a guided meditation with breathing into different parts of the body, so you can
actually breathe into an area of constriction, in and out of that place, the throat is constricted or the
heart center is constricted, what would it be to breathe in and out there, the breath energy is coming in
and out there.

Oftentimes, the place that feels most blocked, most constricting, ends up being the most pleasant place,
when we can work with that inner openness. It's almost like it's got a lot of energy there, that just needs
opening a little bit, and then it starts to feel really good, sometimes, often.

(11:15) Last night I also mentioned fear, often around discomfort in the body, pain in the body, there's
fear, it's a very understandable human reaction. Can we be aware of that fear and just notice, is the fear
building the pain? Building the sense of discomfort, because it almost certainly will. Is it possible to
just see that process going on, somehow in seeing it, it doesn't build it so much. And last, as I said, is
move, move the body and don't go beyond what is your limit with this, absolutely, play with your
edges. Really I encourage you to play with the edges around discomfort and constriction sometimes but
know what the limits are and then move. If you need to move, move the body slowly (12:07), quietly,
considerately. So quite a lot to play with in that area of pain and more often as the meditation goes on
just a sense of constricted or blocked energy.

Last night I also talked about the hindrances and I mentioned two specific things: the sloth and torpor,
drowsiness, and restlessness. Really on this retreat seeing "can I breathe in a way that energizes?". I can
use the breath to really energize, really seeing if I can experiment and get a sense with that. Or
sometimes you can breathe to calm, so whatever is needed. Does it need a calming breath or an
energizing breath? Really using that, if it's restless breath in a calming way, see if you can find a way
into that. And vice-versa if you need an energizing breath. But by all means if there's tiredness or all the
other things I suggested, reaffirm the uprightness of posture. Breathing long, the in-breath is inherently
more energizing, we're taking in energy with the in-breath. I know this is a lot of information, take what
you can. Taking in energy with the in-breath, if it's restlessness then the out-breath is inherently
relaxing and you tune more into the in-breath or the out-breath as needed. So always responding,
feeling free to open the eyes, taking in space. To stand up if necessary, to walk briskly. (13:51)

So a little bit about the other 3 hindrances.

Doubt is a very common one. Doubting oneself, "I can't do this, maybe everyone else here can do this
but I can't do this". Doubting this approach, "is this really Buddhist?", "is this really Kosher?",
whatever. Very normal, it's just a hindrance. Just see it as that, it's just doubt, it's just doubt, and say to it
"I'll come back to you later". And make a pact with it, make an agreement, does it feel ignored, this
part? And you say "I'll come back to you later", and then that later might be the end of the retreat and
just giving oneself to this retreat. Or it might be the end of this sitting. Just see it as doubt, come back
to it later. And please ask questions in the groups. Ask questions, if something is "Hm, not sure", ask
questions.

(14:55) And sometimes we find ourselves sitting here and fantasizing, in a sexual fantasy, or
fantasizing about lunch, or whatever it is. Can we see that there's suffering involved in that? There's a
kind of hungry leaning forward in the mind that's actually suffering. Can we use whatever comfortable
pleasant feeling there might be there as actually a resource? Slowly, slowly, we're actually with that in a
way that we need to go out less. So really tuning into that comfort. Very important.

(15:31) And then lastly, also with greed but with aversion too, actually sometimes it's worth stopping
the breath meditation, actually deliberately reflecting, "is this taking me where I want to go?", "is this
useful, or is this suffering?". We get irritated at something, or angry at something going on, or wanting
something, and just using the reflective mind, "is this really helping?". It seems so convincing
sometimes, these hindrances, once they've got their hooks into something, actually using the reflective
mind at times to see if it can dis-engage that. The Buddhist golden question on his path was "what's
helpful and what's not?", it's that simple, "what leads to suffering and what doesn't?", "What leads to
freedom?". (16:28). Using the reflective mind.

Okay, that was a lot of information, I'm aware. So let's do a meditation now. (16:56) Just take what you
can of the information, the sort of tips and whatever you call it, that's coming out, take what you can,
take what feels useful, play with some of the pieces and let the rest go and if you're interested it'll be
there on the recordings.

(17:22) So just settling once again into your posture, finding that ease, that poise, that balance, the
expression of alertness, sensitivity, in and through the posture.

Recognizing again, reflecting again that this practice is a gesture of goodwill, it's a gesture of kindness
and a care to yourself. Really being clear (18:12) about that. There's no other reason that we're doing it.
Connecting with that kindfulness and wishing yourself well.
Extending that well-wishing to everyone here, just opening up wishing everyone here in this room well.
Everyone here at Gaia House well. And even further to all beings.

Establishing this whole-body sensitivity, sensitive to the whole body. That whole area of energy, of
vibration, feeling, texture. Alive, sensitive, open to the whole body. (19:36) Then placing the attention
within that, placing the attention on an area, a small area, just below the navel, the belly-button, and a
little bit to the left. Just a few centimeters below and to the left of the bellybutton, it's not an exact area,
just a general area there. And feeling or imagining feeling the breath coming in and out at that spot. So
the body is breathing in breath energy there and letting it out there. Breathing it out there. (20:48) But
open to the whole body, but really focusing in on that spot, how it feels, how does it feel, with the
breath coming in and going out there? Just being open, delicate, letting go of preconceptions. Delicate
with the sensitivity.

How does it feel in the rest of the body with the breath going in and out of there? What kind of breath
does the body want when the breath is going in and out of there? Long, short, coarse, subtle, rough,
smooth? Not putting a lot of physical pressure on the breath, just opening up by dropping that question.
(22:06) Perhaps the breath goes in there and radiates up the left side of the body, down the left leg,
perhaps, perhaps a different kind of movement. Perhaps it just wells up in that point. Just open, delicate
sensitivity.

And then moving that point where the breath comes in and out to the same point on the other side, on
the right-hand side. Just a few centimeters down and to the right of the bellybutton. How does that feel
in the whole body? What kind of breath feels best there, for the whole body? Not pressurizing either
the body or the mind, just being open, delicate. And how about the breath coming in and out at the Hara
point in the center, a few centimeters below the navel. How does that feel? The whole body. (25:15)

(26:47) If you want, if you feel ready, shifting that area of the spot where the breath goes in and out of
the body to the solar plexus, the top of the abdomen, around the sternum. How does that feel in the
whole body, in the rest of the body? And what kind of breath feels best there? (27:30) (28:22) How
about a little bit higher, in the heart center, the center of the chest? The breath energy moving in and out
from that point. Just feeling how that moves, vibrates, opens in the rest of the body. (29:21) Make sure
one is including your legs, in the whole body experience.

(30:08) If you want, checking out how it might feel with the breath energy coming in and out at the
base of the throat. If a place feels particularly good you don't need to check all of these out right now.
You might want to stay a little bit with where it feels good.

(32:08) Opening the body to the breath. How might it be if the breath energy comes in to a point in the
area at the center of the head? What kind of breath feels best there, for the whole body? Just allowing
the breath to be comfortable in these places (33:19), without forcing. How does it feel in the whole
body if the breath energy were to come in and go out through the top of the head, the crown of the
head? Coming in and out at that point, at that area. Is there a way that can feel good in the whole body?
(35:27) Stay in that place, how would it be if the breath comes in at the top of the head and moves right
down the body, the energy moves right down the body out the feet, in through the top of the head, down
the body and then out the feet, releasing through the feet.

(36:36) Not grasping too tightly, just being open, light with the intention. Moving that spot to the base
of the neck. What kind of breath feels best there? Long, or very long, or very short, feeling right now
for yourself in this moment. Open to the whole body. (38:13) And then, the middle of the upper back,
the sort of backside of the heart center, on the spine. What does that need? A very delicate, soothing,
gentle breath? A longer breath, that really fills the body? (39:30) How about the base of the spine? How
does the breath energy move in the body when it comes in and goes out there? How does that feel?

(40:44) If you want to, how does it feel the breath coming in through the feet, through the soles of the
feet, moving up the body out the top of the head?

(42:00) And just centering the awareness right at the core of the body, right in the middle of that whole
energy field, really putting the awareness in there, centering it there. Knowing the whole body from
that place, a spider at the center of the web know everything that happens in the web, whenever
something touches anywhere in the web it know it, it feels it. Centering right at the center of the body.
Is it possible to feel, to conceive of the breath, rather than coming in from the outside, it's actually
welling up from the center of the body, expanding from the center of the body. Expanding to fill the
body.

(44:02) Just letting the awareness stay there if you want or allowing it to go to any of those places,
whichever feels the best right now, just to be there, centered there with the breath coming in and going
out of that point, feeling the whole body. So wherever feels best.

5: 2008-08-10 Talk Three: Wise Effort and Wise Attachment

So, tonight, what I want to go into a little bit is wise effort and wise attachment and explore this a little
bit with you. Particularly this question of, um, wise effort that has a lot of different kind of levels or
sizes to it. So both on a micro level in our practice, moment to moment, how are we doing with that
effort? What's happening in relationship to effort and trying, etc? Really, really crucial, but equally
crucial is a kind of a macro-level big picture question, "How am I in my life in relationship to effort, to
goals, to progress, notions like that?"—which I touched on very briefly last night but I want to explain
more fully tonight, starting with the macro, the big picture, and working towards the micro level.
This question I feel is really, really key. What is my relationship to concepts, notion of goals in the
spiritual path, progress on the spiritual path. It's actually really, really fundamental for us to, well, to
grapple with that question, because it turns out not to be an easy question for most people nowadays in
the West. So, we can have a notion, "it's about just being", whatever on earth that means. "Just being"
or "just being with what is", but like I said last night the Buddha didn't actually say that, or speak that
way, or really point to that. A notion like that can be very useful, very useful at times, as sort of one
approach within our buffet of approaches. But if that's exclusively how we're approaching the spiritual
life, our spiritual life ends up bearing very little similarity to the rest of our life because our life is
actually full of goals. It's full of goals.
So I gave the example of driving a car. One needs to, I'm getting from here to there and I'm going to
negotiate in a way that gets there. When I go to the toilet, I need to have a goal to get the stuff in the
bowl. (laughing) And others are thankful that I have that goal when I... If you're in a relationship, even
a friendship, you may be conscious of this or not, but a goal is for it to work, to move toward more
harmony, and if there's a fracture or disharmony or disease between two people, the goal is to heal that,
to move toward something that's harmonious and working. We may not frame it that way, but it's
actually important that aspiration is there. In the heart, in the mind.
Goals in themselves are not a problem, aspirations are not a problem. Where we trip up, where get
ensnared is in the self-view that forms around our relationship with goals. The problem of self-
measurement, "Am I good enough? Am I not good enough? How do I compare?" All of this brings
pain. I and I and measuring and comparing go together in a way that's oftentimes not very healthy, they
often go together. It's when the I is wrapping around a self-view in relationship to the goal. "I'm not
there yet. He's there. She's there. They're further toward it and I am not." And I create a self-view
around failure. Around being slow. Around being stupid. Around being spiritually inept, or whatever it
is.
So the question is "If I'm throwing this out, this whole notion, is then my conceiving of the path, the
spiritual path, is then that atrophied in some way? Do I then have a kind of shrunken and atrophied
relationship and version of spirituality?" And sometimes, well, often, that's quite common, for us in the
West to do that. We may be conscious of the reasons why we do, we may be less conscious of the
reasons why we're doing it, but this is very common for us to just sweep that whole aspect, those whole
notions aside, and have a different, you know, it's easy to get into a different kind of image of what a
spiritual person is or what the spiritual path involves.
Even teachers can do this. One teacher was telling me she was teaching in a city in Europe where she
lives, and it's a very affluent city—I don't know what they do, something that makes a lot of money
(laughs)—and she had an evening class and the first time it met, arrived about 20 sort of corporate
executives from work, with suits and briefcases from work, and went around sort of introducing, "What
do you do?" and they were all like really high-flying executives. And just vaguely, in the back of her
mind, she thought, "Well, this is different, I wonder if these people are going to get it," kind-of-thing,
not even a fully formed thought. She said as soon as the class started, all of them just plugged in the
same kind of get-down-to-it, gung-ho they do in their corporate whatever.
And she said it was fantastic, absolutely fantastic! She hadn't even realized she had this image of what
spiritual people, whatever, they live in Totnes... (laughing) Sorry. Apologies to [inaudible].
If you read the original suttas, the word striving, the Buddha uses that a lot. It's a word which has
disappeared from the modern dharma culture, and there are really understandable reasons for that, and
I'm going to go into that tonight, but the Buddha originally uses this word a tremendous amount, all of
the time he uses it, "striving, striving," toward the goal. And at the same time, he's not, you know, dumb
about this. He acknowledges that in the process for yearning for something beautiful, aspiring to
something, wanting to move to a goal, there will be something called the distress of the renunciator, the
distress of the practitioner that there's an acknowledgment there's going to be some dissatisfaction. "I'm
over here and I want to be over there," and it's like ugh, and that's oh—just the acknowledgment, that
will be there from time to time and, you know what, it's ok. It's really ok. It can be embraced,
included."
So what we really need, I feel, is a healthy attitude, a deeply healthy attitude towards moving toward
the aspirations and our goals, towards effort. In a way our aspirations, our goals... they're what give our
life direction and in so doing they align us with what is beautiful and they give our life a kind of
nobility.
One of my teachers says, "A life, a life without that kind of aspirations or goals is just"—this is not a
very nice image, kind of harsh—"is just like being a fish flopping around in a puddle. Nothing's really
happening. You've just got flopping, not going anywhere." It's a little harsh.
It's part of the art, this really... grappling with it, working with this relationship to effort is part of the art
of meditation. There's no question about it. So... Why do we back away sometimes from the notion of
goals, from the notion of really clear aspirations? Well, as I mentioned, there's that pain of self-view.
The self gets wrapped around the whole concept. I said, I think it was last, the notion of success implies
the notion of failure. And we fear that end of things, but if I entertain the notion of possible success, I'm
inviting the notion of possible failure, but out of my fear around failure, I throw out the whole thing,
and there's a cost to that. A deep cost to that.
Sometimes we're just tired, just tired from life, we're just tired, and we don't want another thing to
aspire to, another goal. Sometimes, and this is important, too, we're tired from having goals in our life
that are not meaningful to us. They're just kind of stuff that somehow we're caught up in working
towards and, maybe at one level, we really want that, but at a deep level, this isn't even important to us.
And somehow our life is become... kind of on this locomotive toward something that on a relative level
is kind of meaningless to us. Of course then we turn off the whole notion of goals.
Sometimes even a noble goal, a beautiful goal, awakening, enlightenment, whatever, wanting to
develop a boundless loving heart, even a noble goal can become to feel meaningless to us. If we slip
into a relationship with it, which is quite easy, a relationship with it which is unhelpful or distorted in
some way, then even what's noble comes to feel like "ugh", meaningless. It's lost it's beauty. If
somehow in the way of seeing it, we're distorting something.
Buddha said once, "It is by relying on craving that craving is to be abandoned." So the goal of the path
is to abandon craving, that's sort of one of the ways of summarizing what awakening is, enlightenment
is. It is by relying on craving that craving is to be abandoned. There's something in actually using this
desire, this craving, to move beyond it.
Sometimes I wonder if our problem is not that we have too much desire, it's that we don't have enough.
We don't have enough desire. Somehow we haven't let it burn deep in the being, sink deep in the being,
that passion, that fire. Somehow.
Or we're not selective enough with our desires. We're not in a way picky enough with our desires. A
little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of pleasure. It's all like, almost like, not asking quite
enough. We demonize desire but sometimes maybe we don't have enough. It doesn't run deep enough.
So what might be wise effort? What might be wise effort? This a really important question and I do feel
that word "grapple" is appropriate at times. We really need to go into this in our life, and we'll go
through different relationships with this, etc. Just reflect a little bit what wise effort might involve. You
could break it down into three aspects.
One is the question of, "Effort toward what? Where is it directed? Where am I directing my effort?
Toward what?" I'm going to go into this. The second is, "What's involved in wise effort and what's not
involved in wise effort?" In other words, "What's a part of wise effort and what's not a part of wise
effort?" The second part.
The third part is a question of balance. So I'm going to go into these.
So the first one. Where is my effort directed? This is actually really important. When the Buddha talked
about what's called right effort, he summarized it as part of the 8-fold path, the path that leads to
liberation, to awakening, he said that right effort involves four right efforts. They are the effort to give
rise to wholesome, beautiful, skillful qualities of the mind and heart. That we actually... like we're
doing here, we're trying to nourish and cultivate a state of calm, of energized calm, of shamatha,
samadhi, that right effort, to give rise to what's wholesome and beautiful, metta, generosity, all of the
things I've mentioned here or there.
Giving rise to and once it's arisen, to maintain it, so here in the practice we're working with the breath
and it feels good and the mind and the body begin to feel unified in that open awareness. It feels good
and steady and can we just encourage that to sustain a little, to maintain? That's the second of the right
efforts.
The third is to abandon what is the qualities that are the opposite of that, the unskillful, unhelpful,
unwholesome, not-so-beautiful qualities. That are actually... not that they're not going to arise, not that
they're not part of being human, but we're interested in letting them go when there's irritation, when
there's jealousy, when there's anger, when there's things that aren't helpful. Some of these
[unintelligible], some of these are more interesting. So anger, sometimes there may be aspects that are
actually helpful. That's a whole other talk.
Abandoning what's not helpful, and the last one, preventing the future arising of what's not helpful. So
what am I doing now that I'm in a way setting the soil, taking care of the soil, so that the weed don't
arise? Now, I know nothing about gardening. I don't even know if that's possible. (laughing) But I'm
assuming it is. Probably you just spray it with a bunch of chemicals. Something we're doing that's
preventing the future arising of states that are not so helpful.
These make up the four right efforts. So where is it directed. It's directed toward that... awakening,
liberation, nirvana, whatever word you want to use. Now, interesting, that's really not that interesting to
some people. And that's totally fine, and I totally accept that, but for some people it really is. That again
will be a whole other subject.
Or the whole idea of there is perhaps something deathless to be realized. Something that is beyond
death. That as human beings it's possible for us to know, and the knowing of that is profoundly
liberating. Indescribably liberating. And so in a way the right effort is also toward that. And again this
will be sort of interesting to some people and not to others. But, always the Buddha said the four right
efforts are: giving rise to what's beautiful, what's helpful, maintaining what's helpful, abandoning and
preventing what's not so helpful.
Sometimes I know that in mentioning the deathless, etcetera, that does not resonate at all with some
people, because in a way not to mention it would be doing a bit of a disservice to what the possibilities
and what the aspirations might be, for some.
What's a part of this wise effort, I feel, and I feel the Buddha also, that wise attachment is actually
needed. What does that actually mean, wise attachment? So we actually need to get attached to our
care, about our ethics, care about what we're putting out in the world, the sila. We actually need to get
attached to samadhi, shamatha. We actually need to get attached to our understanding, our insight.
Attached to sila, samadhi, these pali words for that.
We tend to think we shouldn't get attached to anything, but I don't know if that's the most skillful way
of seeing things. That doesn't seem to be the way the Buddha thought either. A baby, a newborn baby
needs to get attached to its mother. It absolutely needs that. It's getting attached to a good thing there.
It's healthy for the baby to be attached to the baby and the mother to be attached to the baby.
It's like modern psychologists talk about attachment theory, and it's that whole theory like how that
happens, and how to take care of that, and what happens to the baby and the growth of the baby when
that isn't there. So attachment is actually important for something to grow, and it's the same spiritually.
It's the same on the path. So the baby is nourished by attachment to the mother. With a sense of
balance! So if the mother is unable to, say when the baby starts toddling, unable to tolerate the baby
going, you know, twenty yards away or whatever, ten yards away, the mother is over grasping, an
unhealthy kind of attachment, and that's too much.
The same with what attachment to what's beautiful in the path. What's healthy, and when is it too
much? And, eventually, we begin to wean ourselves off that attachment, off our attachment to ethics,
which doesn't mean we act unethically, it just means we're not attached. We wean ourselves off the
attachment to the pleasure of shamatha and samadhi. It doesn't mean we don't keep practicing samadhi.
We wean ourselves off the attachment, even we wean ourselves off the attachment to insight. Insight is
also not the goal of the path. It's actually just a stage, a stage to liberation. And one can wean oneself
off these things, but only when you've had enough of them. Only when you've caught on to them in a
good way.
So the Buddha didn't say let go of everything, right now, just let go. He didn't teach that way. What
happens if we try and do that is that one just falls back on the kind of hidden attachments that one has,
or one's even, I think I said yesterday, unaware of a whole strata, a whole festering forest of
attachments that are actually operating. We haven't developed the subtlety enough, the depth of
wisdom. One just falls back on default assumptions. Sometimes one just falls back on obvious
attachments.
Without in a way attaching to ethics, to samadhi, to insight we don't have the leverage, yeah, the
leverage to pry ourselves loose of the less helpful things that we're attached to. I think of an image of a
ladder, and climbing the latter, climbing towards liberation, wherever, in a way you hold on to this rung
up here and that very holding on up here is what allows you to let go with your feet down there. Or you
push with one foot on the lower rung. So there's a leaning on and attachment, relying on something to
reach something else.
Oftentimes, especially around shamatha and samadhi, people often arise the objection, "Won't I get
attached to this if it's pleasant? Won't I get attached to it?" Sometimes we're more worried about the
possibility that we might get attached to the pleasantness of samadhi, when our life is full of all kind of
attachment: attached to where we live and where we eat, and all kinds of stuff.
Why are we more worried about one necessarily than the other? So the Buddha has this image of a raft
and the image of liberation being the other shore, and we're moving from this shore where there's
suffering to the other shore. It's a poetic image. And you use the raft to get across, but you don't
abandon the raft on this side or even in the middle. You don't chop up the raft to make firewood before
you've set out, and then jump up and down triumphantly that you've let go of the raft. You're still on
this shore.
Or a more modern image, perhaps. I got a car and I want to drive to, I don't know, Inverness or
something. Is my car going to last forever? Certainly not my car, but that's not the point. No, the car is
not going to last forever, but maybe it can still get me to Inverness, which is where I want to go. Is the
car going to break down? Maybe. Maybe it'll break down. I can fix it. Am I going to run out of fuel?
Maybe, but I can refuel.
Okay, so where is it directed? The second aspect. What's involved in right effort and wise effort, and
what's not involved. Well, one really important energy constellation that's not involved in wise effort is
the whole kind of structure of the inner critic. Now, we could easily spend a whole dharma talk just on
this. It's so prevalent and endemic to our culture. This kind of inner voice that's constantly commenting
in negative ways, constantly judging what we're doing. "It's not good enough. You're not there yet.
Didn't do that right. Nun-nun-nun-nun." Always blaming. Always criticizing. Always judging. Always
comparing, in that negative way.
This is I think absolutely huge in our culture in the West. It's massive. And in a way it has massive,
massive clout, both internally—how much power does that kind of constellation have in our lives? For
each of us to really reflect on this, how much does that structure, what I'm calling the inner critic, how
much is that pulling the strings? It's not there for everyone, but a lot, a lot of people it's there. Maybe
not all the time, but a lot. How much is that directing my choices, pulling the strings? How much clout
and power does that have?
And how much clout and power does it have in the dharma culture? So, in the wider culture, but also in
the dharma culture. Are there things that perhaps we're not talking about as teachers because somehow
they, the inner critic in many people, will get hold of them and it will be painful, and is that effecting
the dharma culture as a whole? That because I might, I feel if I might say something, when I say
something, I feel some pain in response to that, do I then back off saying that thing? If I do, how much
is that effecting the dharma culture?
Am I not talking about certain things, nibbana, the deathless, etcetera etcetera, samadhi even, because
it's painful for me to feel the pain coming back? I think this is a huge, huge question as in the West as a
dharma culture, collectively together, we need to really look at and address. There's so much pain
bound up in this structure, so much suffering bound in this structure, and it has so much power. And it's
possible, it's very possible, to be totally free from it. No matter how bad it is now. It's possible to be
completely free from it.
And that could happen gradually. I know from some students I worked with over quite some time. Or it
could happen (snaps) like that. Very, very suddenly. Either way. Gradual or sudden. It's totally possible
to be totally free.
I just want to spend a little time talking about this structure of the inner critic and how to work with it,
although we could spend a whole talk on this. I'm not going to.
I want to throw out a few possible strategies of working with it. The first is, to turn around and actually
speak to it, and ask it, "If I achieved whatever it's saying I'm not good enough for not achieving, if I
achieved X, would you be satisfied then?" Now, what happen, what might happen when you do that, it
might just go, "Yes. I will."
Don't move too quickly. Stay there with it. See if that yes is a genuine yes. "Really? Really? Are you
telling me the truth?" Hang out with it. What you'll see is that it's full off... bologna, basically. It's full
of hot air. It's whatever, you'll see that whatever stage you get to, whatever you achieve, it will never be
enough to satisfy the inner critic. It's never going to be enough. You begin to see that it's a totally
unreasonable, irrational kind of structure that's going on. In a way that begins to just... you can't take it
so seriously. This is even anything reasonable, or intelligent, or rational.
Sometimes you see this— it just kind of blips up, this irrational comment of "not good enough, not
good enough." It's just a blip of something irrational.
Now, we can also kind of put that in complement with something else which, in a way, you could say,
"It's good to not be satisfied on the path. It's good to not be satisfied until one's a Buddha. Until one's
totally finished with the path." And there's a kind of healthy dissatisfaction, you know, to see that I can
develop more. I can understand deeper. I can do that. That's possible. And in a way I'm not quite
satisfied until I'm there. There's another part that's not quite satisfied until it's got that deeper
development, deeper understanding. And there's a way that can actually be healthy.
Again, what makes it unhealthy is when does it become a self-evaluation, a self-value judgment. When
are we defining the self, binding the self with conclusions about our ourselves based on this
dissatisfaction? It's turned into something that was about the path and about our aspirations, it's moved
from that into a kind of self-definition, and we're wrapping that around ourselves and it's painful, and
constricted, something that's burning the skin.
Judging oneself. Third possibly. It's not, it's usually just not helpful outright but, if we're going to judge
anything, how about judging our intentions? We are a little bit more in control so-to-speak of our
intentions. We have the intention for samadhi. We have the intention for kindness. We have the
intention for goodness. Etcetera. We have less control over the results. There are too many other factors
that are at play that govern the result.
In other words, I have the intention for samadhi, but I might have just had some really bad news, or a
cold. I might have this or that. I'm not in control enough of the flow of past conditions and present
conditions that are effecting the result. If I judge myself based on the result, it's... it's not wise. If one is
going to judge oneself, judge based on the intentions.
Can we respect ourselves for the right kind of things? So oftentimes self-respect in our culture gets
measured in different ways: how beautiful we are, how rich, how this or that, what kind of status we
have in society, and then we end up, our actual sense of self-respect gets measured along those lines.
Can we actually have it run along more healthy lines? That we're respecting ourselves for our ethical
care, for instance, that we're respecting the beauty of our intentions, the beauty of our aspirations, the
fact that we're actually engaging in a process to work towards what we really care about, that we're
really doing that. That's something to respect.
And sometimes it's worth actually inclining the mind again toward the positive and actually dwelling,
sitting, in the sense of our goodness, the sense of what we really value and respect about ourselves.
Actually cherishing that beauty of ourselves. This is not a very popular notion in the culture. That
sounds very egoic, very kind of self-obsessed, etcetera. What would it be to really just remind oneself
of one's nobility, of one's beautiful aspirations, etcetera? Of one's care for ethics. And, really, as a
meditation sit with that. Bring the mind back to that. Dwell in that. See what happens.
Most of the time we dwell in the exact opposite. (Mumbling) "I'm not good enough." (Unintelligible
mumbling) (Laughing) It becomes a habit, unfortunately, and we're suspicious of the wrong thing.
Instead of being suspicious of that, we're suspicious of dwelling in a sense of our beauty and cherishing
our self and respect for us.
The Buddha makes a very important distinction between actions and essence so, instead of judging
people, it's assessing, discerning whether action helpful or not. This thing that I do, this response that I
gave, or that way that I was in that situation: was that helpful or not? Not judging the self for that, just
judging "Ah, that wasn't that skillful how I said that to that person. In the future I want to do it
differently." It's a very subtle shift, but it's actually, you know what, it was one of the strokes of genius
that the Buddha introduced. Shifting to actions from essence, and not making conclusions about the
essence of oneself or another person, but instead just discerning, "What action is helpful? What action
is not helpful?"
It might sound a little abstract but trying to put this into effect in our being, that actually is, it's
implications are massive and run very deep.
Fifth one. What exactly am I criticizing when I criticize myself? What exactly am I criticizing? I
usually feel like I'm ending up criticizing myself, whatever that is, but that's a kind of big, abstract
picture. If I dissect it a little bit, what I find is what I'm actually judging is a moment of something and
that moment, when I really look at it, I can't find a self in it.
I'm sitting in meditation and the mind wanders off. What am I judging there, exactly? Judging a
moment of forgetfulness? A moment where I didn't have mindfulness? Is that moment of not being
mindful, is that myself? Somehow we don't see that. We're taking this micro-moment and blowing it up
to be a self and then we judge that self and we get into pain, pain around self. Does that make sense?
What one sees the more one practices samadhi, the more one goes into this, is that when it feels good,
when things kind of come together and unify and the mind feels good and the body feels good, and
that's going well, that's not really dependent on the self. That's dependent on the conditions, and when
the conditions are there, and they come together, samadhi is there. When the conditions are not there,
samadhi is not there, and it actually has very little to do with self. It takes time to see that, but it takes
away, either, feeling pumped or "I'm a great meditator" or the opposite, "I'm a failure." It actually has
very little to do with the self. When the conditions are there, it's going to be there.
The seventh one is metta. Loving-kindness meditation. What a huge resource and tool this is for us. So,
long-term loving-kindness practice makes a big difference to this inner critic. Long-term, really just
over and over directing loving-kindness to the self and other, especially towards the self. Washing the
being, bathing the being in loving-kindness. Over a long period, it begins to just soften, open, to crack
open that inner-critic.
But, also, in the short-term, so when you're here on the cushion, in the context of this retreat we're
working on the breath, and the mind has got very tight, and a lot of harshness and judgment, maybe just
go to the loving-kindness practice, and actually just direct some loving-kindness toward yourself.
Maybe just for a few minutes, for the rest of the session, whatever it needs. So both long-term and
short-term really, really help.
And just lastly, I mentioned this in the opening talk, shifting the emphasis away from a kind of self-
preoccupation in practice and realizing that we're practicing for all beings. Just reminding oneself of
that. We get too tight around the self and, "How am I doing?", etcetera. Just opening out can really
help.
Attitude is really, really important with all of this. I head that Michelangelo at 87—87 years old!—he'd
done David, he'd done the Sistine Chapel and everything, and he said, "I'm still learning how to sculpt."
Still with that process of learning, discovering, and even someone who's fully enlightened is still
learning, still learning. So to expect waves is also really important of our attitude. It's not going to feel
good all of the time. It's going to be a real up and down, and really expecting those up and downs.
There's going to be hindrances. There's going to be times when the body feels constricted, etcetera.
When there's agitation, "What can I learn here about working with what's difficult?" That question, if
that question can be here, "What can I learn here?" So shamatha practice is not just about things feeling
good. It's also about, "What can I learn when it doesn't feel so good?"
Sometimes in this kind of practice, you know, we talk about the mind settling down, etcetera, we
actually need to not get too fixated on how concentrated we are and actually step back and see a bigger
picture, "What else am I encouraging, nurturing, cultivating, in this process, even when it doesn't feel
good?" So it may be that mind keeps going off and I keep coming back and it keeps going off and I
keep coming back, and I'm actually developing patience there. Do I see that I'm developing patience?
Because that makes a difference, if I see a bigger picture of what's happening here. I see more
usefulness to this time, even if the mind is off, I'm still developing patience. Maybe the development of
patience is as significant as the development of concentration.
If the mind goes off many times, and I'm trying not to get involved in the judgmentalism and I'm just
stopping the judgmentalism and coming back, I'm also weakening judgmentalism. That's also
immensely significant. There's a bigger picture of what's going on here, than just, "Can I stay with the
breath?" and if I can I get a tick and if I can't I get a red dot, "Please see the teacher."
Patient, non-judgmentalism. We're developing the muscle of the mind every time it goes and bring back
and every time it goes and bring back and every time it goes and bring back. Soon, the muscle gets big.
It's not imagined.
Or when it's not going well, bringing some questioning in. What's the reason it's not going well? What
can I do? The spirit of questioning is also something we can cultivate. That's also going on in the bigger
picture. That's also helpful. That's not wasted time. That's really, really important. That's not wasted
time.
Sometimes in our relationship with a goal we get too focused on the result and we lose the focus on
what we need to do in the moment to move toward that goal and this can be quite subtle. We're just in
the meditation with a bit of like, "em, it's just not good enough." We want something. Maybe we've had
a taste of it before, and it's a kind of leaning forward in the moment. So watch out for this.
And the question, "Is that there? Am I skipping over paying attention, to taking care of the causes right
now? Am I engaging with the practice?" This is really important. Am I engaging? Or have I gone to the
future or just kind of given up. So, am I taking care of the wide body awareness? Am I playing with the
breath? Am I playing with, as I'll talk about now, effort levels? etc.
One of the Buddha's lists is what's called the four, four bases of success. It's not a list you hear much.
The four bases of success. If you want to succeed at something, including meditation, four qualities
need to be there and you need to check that they're there: Desire. Persistence. Intent-ness, or kind of
focus, full-attentiveness, and the last one is, um, sort of ingenuity.
But check, "Is the desire there?" Desire is actually a factor of succeeding. We need to have desire. We
need to want it to work. Persistence is just keep trying. You just keep trying. You fall off the saddle, you
get back. It's like this persistence is actually a factor needed for success.
Intent-ness, that you're with the breath, and you're really with the body, there's something... you're
giving it your whole attention. You're really engaging with the process. How's the breath? What feels
best? Where shall I breathe from, in my whole body? You're really there, with a fullness of being. That
has to be there.
This is the same for anything. If you want to write a novel, or write a symphony, or whatever. Some big
project. These four things: desire, persistence, intent-ness, and kind of responsive ingenuity. They all
need to be there. Otherwise this project is not going to happen.
So this last one. Vimansa is a strange word. A kind of active intelligence, that we're really using our
ingenuity. We're creative in the moment. We're responding, and sometimes that might be a deft touch
and that might be going into another approach, doing some loving-kindness or, if we feel really like
uninspired, reflecting on death. [laughing] That always makes em laugh.
It's good for you! You know, we can get lazy, and it's because we don't realize, we don't have our
priorities straight.
So. Factors of wise effort. What's [unintelligible] and what's involved in wise effort? Wise effort, it
needs a sense of juice. It needs some juicy-ness. So often—this is so common—people are approaching
practice from a "should". There's a sense of, "Oh, I should practice." I should-should-should, or I
should be doing this practice or I really should get my samadhi together, or I should be a better
concentrator. I should have more loving-kindness.
How much of our effort is coming from should? This is so, so crucial. Sometimes we don't even realize
how much is coming from should, and then with that should the question, "Am I doing it right or am I
doing it wrong?" and there's fear behind that question. So much fear behind that question.
When practice is coming from should and this "Am I doing it right?" Eventually, and probably not too
long a time, it will dry up. It will crack or it will hit a wall. Can we have some juice in our effort, in our
aspiration? We're actually approaching practice out of interest, out of love, out of passion, even, desire.
We want something. Not that we think should be somehow, that we actually really want...
So, wise effort... it also needs faith and I think it needs a sense of possible. We really need to feel that
something is possible for us. With that, there's not going to be a kind of balance and wisdom in the
effort.
But with this practice, particularly this kind of practice we're doing, we begin to see... begin to get a
kind of experiential faith. We're never too far away from a pleasant feeling. Even in this moment,
constriction, pain, this emotion, whatever. Actually you begin to get a sense over time, you're never too
far away from some kind of pleasant abiding.
Okay, I'm hopelessly ridiculous with time tonight. Let's skip to the third one.
Balancing, okay? Third aspect of wise effort, and I'm using it in a, I don't know what it's called,
present-participle. Balancing. As a verb. So, what that implies, there's a responsiveness there. There's a
responsiveness to our effort. It's not a static thing. This is really important.
So sometimes we get the image, I'll just kind of find the like, I'll put the dial on five and kind of go into
cruise control with the effort. It's not that at all. There's a real, um, yeah... real fluidity and
responsiveness with effort that's important. So actually, it's always a question, uh, am I too much right
now? Am I too little? Am I too tight? Am I too loose? It's part of the art, playing with that effort,
playing with the effort.
And as we deepen in the meditation, this gets subtler and subtler. So our awareness of when it's too
much and when it's not enough, when we're a little bit too tight. We develop more of the sensitivity I've
been talking about. We develop more and more subtlety to that, more and more awareness of subtlety
with that. And that's very gradual. A big part of what I mean when I say sensitivity.
The Buddha has an image of right efforts like holding a little bird. If you squeeze too tight, you're
going to kill the bird. If you're too loose, the bird just flies away. With the mind, if we squeeze too tight,
it has a funny effect. First of all, you actually feel it in the body. If you squeeze too tight with your
effort, trying to hold onto the breath, the moment, and the body, you actually feel the tightness in the
body, so let this whole body awareness actually reflect that back to you when it's too tight.
What you also notice is when you squeeze too tight, it's almost like you're putting pressure on the mind.
It actually causes the mind to produce more thoughts. It has the opposite effect of what we want. So to
notice that sometimes when you feel that, "Gosh, there's so much thought going on," notice that
sometimes it's because we're actually too tight with the mind.
You can think also the image of a potter, like a master potter, with the pottery wheel, of clay, and is it
too much pressure to curve the jug, or whatever they're making? Or is too little? There's a real
sensitivity, and for a master potter there's a real refinement of that ability to feel when what's just the
right pressure.
Some of that, the master potter will be able to explain to the apprentice in words. It's like this, and you
feel for this. Another aspect of it, the kind of more subtle aspect of it, is almost not verbalizable, and it's
the same with practice. There's adjustments that we make that we can barely put into language. They're
so subtle the way we're responding to the pressure or the tightness or shaping things or encouraging
things.
So, as I mentioned some point, maybe this morning. The mind will rebel from time to time, the mind
absolutely will rebel, no question about it. Doesn't want [unintelligible] stay with the breath, stay with
the body. It says, "I don't want to stay with the breath." What can really help is softening, relaxing the
effort, the approach there, and moving, using the sense of well-being, so whatever sense of well-being
there is, just bathing that sense of well-being with the breath. So it's a much more relaxed approach.
Bathing the sense of well-being with the breath, and this can be very, very light and very gentle and
even the breath becomes gentle, the effort becomes very gentle, very light, you really just... it's almost
like even the image I have right now is when you bath a newborn baby and you just hold the baby's
head and just, just you know a little bit of water you're splashing over the baby. Even more gentle than
that, you're just bathing the sense of well-being with the breath.
So the comfort and the pleasure is actually important for the effort. If we're connected and nourishing
that sense of comfort, it makes the effort easier. It makes it easier, rather than just kind of dry striving.
It's actually very important, and over time, gradually, not in a linear way, we get more and more skillful
and we develop more and more subtlety in kind of smoothing out the places of constriction, the kind of
places that don't feel so good, and dissolving them and evaporating them in the body, using the breath,
using the touch of the mind, using the way we're conceiving of the breath. We develop more and more
subtlety of skill there.
So I'm gonna throw out... I'm almost finished. I think people are tired. I'm going to throw out three
things I'm going to pick up on tomorrow morning in the instructions, but I'll put them out now so it's
not completely new tomorrow morning. To be aware of how heavy, how forceful the mind is, in
relationship to the body and the breath, to be aware of that, and sometimes to see, "Can the mind and
the attention be really, really light? Really light? Like a feather, light as a feather, just kind of touching
the body with the attention."
And so aware of this heaviness, lightness, and actually experimenting with a very, very light touch of
attention, especially if it's to the whole area of the body, very, very skillful. Something to play with,
another thing to play with, to experiment with.
Second thing, I'll pick up on tomorrow, the breath comes in and out. We have the in and out breathing,
and obviously that's been crucial to what we've been talking about so far, but there's also a kind of more
subtle level of breath energy, that's kind of not so much about it moving in and out, it's almost like the
background energy of the body, the background kind of tone of this bubble, this balloon, this egg shape,
and tuning into that as an energy-field, as a texture, as a vibration, and... in a way that becomes the
breath, the subtle breath, or what we could call the body. The body and the breath kind of fuse at that
point when there's that kind of awareness.
The in and out breathing might be still going on, but it's kind of sort of just one aspect of what's going
on, and maybe it's bathing that sense a little or maybe it's just a bit to one side, but there's a whole kind
of subtler, quieter level of background breath energy. What we call background-body energy we
actually want to begin getting interested in.
Last piece: in the guided meditation this morning, I was moving a little quickly through it. One other
option, I said I think one of the last things, the breath in the middle of the body and kind of expanding
out and filling the body like that. Could it be also that breath energy surrounds the whole body? Here's
the body and you're actually surrounded by breath-energy and one's conceiving of the breath as
breathing in and out through every pore of the whole body. It's just moving in and out to this... this egg,
this bubble. It's just doing this, very, very skillful, and in a way then we can also meld into that breath
energy that surrounds. This also has a lot to do with the effort because it's more of a melting movement.
It's more of a melting movement, an opening movement.
I'll bring this up more tomorrow, but there's a way of conceiving the breath that's sort of all around the
body.
Okay. So this idea of balancing the effort, from here on out, from here until the day one dies, it's going
to be part of practice. Subtler and subtler levels. It's going to be part of practice. Balancing the effort
levels. It's okay that that's part of it. We want to get familiar with it.
But if we're engaged in that kind of balancing, if our effort is right effort, if we're taking care of what's
involved in that effort, if we're those words, "playing", if we're patient, if we're sensitive, if we're
steady, if all of that is there, that's half of the battle for us. It's half the battle, and then we're not
throwing the baby out with the bathwater, which is the danger if we just sideline this whole question of
effort and goals and aspiration. Just that we'll end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We're
not, if we take care of all this, if we give it, if we grapple with it, if we give it some subtle attention and
care, we're not closing doors for ourselves. We're not closing the doors for what might be really, really
beautiful.

6: 2008-08-11 Third Morning Instructions

So, as I’m sure everyone has noticed by now, there are ups and downs, there are waves and you don’t
know where you are right now. You may be on a high, you may be on a low, you may be on a - in
between. And if its low it could be agitation, it could be tiredness, sluggishness, it could be doubt. So
we get this, we get waves, absolutely, and we need to actually expect the waves. There’s no question
about it, it’s part of the practice.

As I was saying last night, a big part of it is attitude and if, in our attitude, we’re actually expecting the
waves we’re kind of getting off on the right foot. If we feel insulted, or inadequate because, you know,
the wave goes down into a trough then we’re off on the wrong foot. We’re kind of starting by shooting
ourselves in the foot. So, attitude, so, so, important, it’s really, really half the battle like I said last night.
How important it can be, how useful it can be as I’ve done sometimes in here starting the meditation,
really realizing this is for my own good, this is why I do this, there’s no other reason, there’s no other
reason than I’m taking care of myself and connecting with that gesture of care, of well-wishing. It’s
why I practice. Its why we practice. And also for the benefit of others. Really connecting with that,
sensing a tone of attitude a climate of attitude really, really helpful.

And again, as I said last night, even when we’re in the trough of the wave, even when things don’t
seem to be going that well, when we’re struggling, just to realise this is still a really good use of our
time. Twenty, I don’t know how long I’ve been meditating … twenty four, twenty three years, whatever
… I’ve never felt that meditation, even when it was really difficult, even just for a little bit of time, was
a waste of time. There’s always more to the picture that we’re developing and sometimes we can ignore
that. What else is being nurtured even as we feel we’re struggling? What else is being nurtured? Its
huge, it’s a much bigger picture.

So, also to do with attitude: can we incline the mind - as I said in the opening talk – towards
appreciation? This is actually not a small thing. People have been remarking on this in groups. It’s
actually something very, very fundamental. It sounds a bit like, oh you know, “that’s a bit, you know,
superficial, cosmetic surgery”, but actually it’s something very deep in the mind, inclining towards
appreciation.

And patience. This word that I introduced on the first night. Patience. Really, really, important. Can we
have a part of the mind that’s just a steady observer, learning, “what can I learn here when it’s difficult?
What can I learn when it’s going well? What can I learn when it just seems to be plateauing? The
teacher who I first learned this approach from – Ajahn Geoff, he was a monk in Thailand for twenty-
something years, and in his first year that he spoke fluent Thai, but he said they were going on about
this, his teachers, and teaching him this, and it took him six months before he even knew what they
were talking about, all this business about breath energy and body and … he didn’t even, it didn’t even
make any sense to him. Just patience, patience.

And the final piece about attitude: to be contented with what we have. So, I’m talking about
comfortable feeling, pleasant feeling. However that is, can I just be contented with that and nurture it,
and nurture it? So, attitude. Really, really key. Checking in with the attitude. Taking care of the attitude
as much as we can.

Then there’s a whole area of thoughts that I want to touch on. Of course, we meet thoughts. We meet a
lot of thoughts in the course of meditation. Some of you will remember… I can’t remember if it was
Hillary Clinton or Nancy Reagan had this anti-drug campaign in the USA. I’m not sure if it arrived
over here. The slogan was ‘just say no!’. Did you get that over here? ‘Just say no’. It’s a bit like that
with thoughts. You ‘just say no’. Sometimes. There’s a kind of renunciation involved. Part of the
difficulty with thoughts is we’re actually infatuated with them. We believe, not even consciously that
they’re going to provide some satisfaction or some excitement or some interest in an otherwise dreary
and dull, you know, day, or sitting, or whatever it is. So, there is an element of renunciation here and
sometimes you just, in the middle of a thought, “I actually don’t need to get to the end of this thought.
I’m not going to be that much happier at the end of the thought than I am at the middle of the thought.
Why pursue it?” Just say no.

Slowly, slowly, we begin to get a sense that there’s actually more satisfaction in that ‘no’ than there is
in the kind of following a thought or filling out an idea. And there is some satisfaction and fulfillment
in, you know, exploring ideas and following thought, etc., but it’s actually quite limited and not very
rich or deep. And we get used to saying ‘no’ and that renouncing of thoughts actually begins to feel “oh
this actually feels quite good”. And we see, I was talking at one point about impulses. In this impulse to
follow thoughts, or an impulse to look up, you’re meditating and someone comes in late, and, “who's
that?” or you’re walking and someone comes into the walking room, “who’s that?”

Again, are you happier now, for knowing who it is? Just to see what’s being fed by something. Is it
feeding happiness or is it actually just feeding hunger again. The hungry mind. Always needing to look.
Always needing to follow this thought. A lot of this is quite subtle.

It moves to a place where it begins. There’s nothing really tempting in the thought, there’s nothing
really there that’s very juicy for us. We’re interested in juice, were interested in happiness, and you
begin see that there’s just, like, some dry bones there. Nothing to sink your teeth into.

So, sometimes when the mindfulness is quite refined, a thought comes up and it’s almost like the
beginning of the thought and a part of the mind, you may notice, part of the mind is kind of peeking, “is
this going anywhere interesting? Might I be interested in the end of this thought?” Don’t even ask that
question. This is quite subtle, but sometimes you should, “is it going anywhere interesting?” Don’t
even ask that.

Sometimes, now we’re talking quite subtly now, but sometimes, it’s almost as if one is meditating quite
well and then there’s a vague stirring. It’s like there’s a beginning of a thought. Or almost a thought
that’s not quite fully formed. And we kind of, a part of the mind wants to define it, and say, “that was
this kind of thought”, or label it, if you’re used to a labeling technique from a different approach. And
to be clear about what it was I was thinking about. But also, we don’t need to be clear. It can just be a
vague sort of cloud of something, a fuzzy cloud, it doesn’t need to be so clear.

So, in the practice we bring the mind back an infinite number of times. We will go off. Hundreds,
thousands, millions of times. That’s ok. And we just bring the mind back, just very simply, very simply,
over and over.

And then sometimes the mind begins to stay a little bit. It stays with the sense of the body, it stays with
that sense of comfort. And this is very interesting. What is it that enables the mind, that encourages and
helps the mind to stay with that nice feeling? Sometimes, we’re just tuning into the pleasure and that’s
really what helps. Sometimes we’re there and it feels comfortable and it feels ok, and you begin to
sense in the mind a little bit of antsiness. It hasn’t moved anywhere yet but it’s just kind of looking. It’s
scouting for somewhere to move for, and it’s just a sense - either you feel it in the body or you feel it
kind of vaguely in the mind – there’s just a little bit tension, or antsiness. You can actually be sensitive
to that, and actually relax the tension, and the mind doesn’t need to move off the comfortable feeling. It
doesn’t need to move off the body.

So, in a way, we need to expect this antsiness and expect that the mind will want to look for somewhere
to move. So, we can actually start watching for the sense of antsiness. Watching for that sense of just a
little bit of, just a stirring of restlessness and tension and responding to that.

So, how might we respond? Well it might be that we need to nurture the comfort a bit more. Maybe
work with the breath, maybe make the breath a bit longer, a bit shorter, a bit more strong, a bit more
refined, whatever it is. There isn’t quite enough comfort for the mind to feel totally settled there yet.
So, the mind is antsy because there’s not enough comfort.

So, we can respond by working with the breath. We can respond by refining the quality of attention.
Sometimes the mind wants to be a bit more subtle in what it’s paying attention to, to tune in a bit more
subtly.
If there’s boredom at any time – this is a whole interesting thing, boredom – but boredom arises when
we’ve withdrawn our sensitivity from the present moment, when we’ve lost that alive kind of interest,
delicacy of attention. With that withdrawal, boredom arises. So, if there’s a moment of boredom and the
mind feels antsy with boredom, to just check the sensitivity. Is it possible to reinvigorate the
sensitivity?

So, attitude, thoughts and the movement of mind towards thoughts. The last thing I want to touch on
today is the relationship of the mind in terms of how light or heavy the pressure, the effort is - and I
touched on this last night in the talk. So, that we’re not pushing the mind too hard to concentrate. We’re
not forcing it to stay with the breath, to stay with the body. And we’re also not just letting it float away.
There’s a real delicacy of art here. And so there can be a very light question in the practice: “how heavy
right now? How heavy should the attention be?” And sometimes we can actually focus on a quality of
lightness, so we can actually focus on a quality of lightness in the body and that actually helps lighten
the mind. The body can actually feel very light instead of heavy sometimes and that can help. Or we
find the quality of lightness in the global experience of the body. That can really be helpful. Or we just
play with this, “can I have a feather-light, feather lightness of attention on the whole-body area?” The
most delicate touch of attention actually can be the most helpful sometimes.

Often with attention we’re used to thinking of, “here’s the attention and I’m paying attention to
something over there”, or “I’m up here, paying attention to the breath and the body down here”. What
would it be to have a kind of three-hundred and sixty degrees awareness? It’s almost like the awareness
sinks into this bubble, this egg of the body and is just permeating that completely. Three-hundred and
sixty degrees; aware of the back, aware of the whole of it, really permeating and suffusing. And then,
with that, kind of, the awareness is actually melting – it’s a very good word – melting into the
comfortable areas. So, we can probe what feels good, certainly. But we can also just melt into it.
Last night I very briefly mentioned in one or two of the groups, it’s possible to conceive of the breath
energy as being all around the body. All around. So, the body is kind of surrounded by this breath
energy. Or this bubble of the body is surrounded by breath energy, and in a way what you’re doing is
you’re opening the body, the sense of the body, to being in this breath energy. Or a sense of receiving it
with the whole body. All the pores are receiving this breath energy. It’s going in and out everywhere in
the body. And you can melt the body into it. You can melt the body three-hundred and sixty degrees
around into this breath energy that surrounds the body or you could melt that breath energy into the
body. Melting is a very useful thing to play with. And I think I already said the breath is all around, can
be all around, and the sense of comfort, the sense of fullness is being bathed by that. We’re bathing it
by that. We’re nourishing that sense of fullness and the whole body sense by the in and out breath.
Every time a breath goes in and out it’s like bathing and nourishing that whole body sense.
So, in a way, what can happen is one is allowing the breath to open up more and more. It’s like the
whole sense of the breath begins to open up more, can begin to open up, and you can encourage that.
The whole space and experience begins to open up. And with that it can become more and more gentle.
More and more sort of porous. This is the body, this is the breath, this is where I end. All that can begin
to sort of become more porous. And it’s almost as if the awareness can seep into the breath and into the
body.

One thing I very briefly said at the end last night: sometimes we can be aware of a kind of background
energy. So, you’ve got the breath coming in and out, but you’ve also got this kind of how this body area
feels. Someone was asking me, you know, you’re using these words – textures, vibrations, energy field
– how does this bubble, how does this egg, how does it feel? It has a certain quality. Just putting the
attention in that whole space – how does it feel? And begin to get a sense of, well, it feels a certain way,
that global sense, it feels a certain way. And sometimes the totality of that begins to feel a little bit
pleasant, and that’s the breath energy. Sometimes it begins to feel a bit constricted and that’s also the
breath energy, it’s constricted breath energy or pleasant breath energy. But it’s a more subtle level of
breath energy than the kind of in and out. So, sometimes, you might be aware of that too, and that can
actually be very helpful, tuning into that level of experience. And in a way, the in and out breath then is
just one part of the total breath energy experience. Its more subtle, but it can be really, really useful o
tune into that. For instance, you breath in, you breath out and there’s a pause before the next in breath.
Just checking, how does the body feel then? The next in breath hasn’t started, but what’s the tone in this
space? How does that space feel, the space of the body? That’s the sense of this more subtle body
sense, or this more subtle breath sense. Sometimes, the breath energy and the body energy feel like two
distinct things, but at other times they’re kind of melted in that more subtle sense.

Ok, so, let’s do a sitting now.

7: 2008-08-11 Talk Four: Jhanas One to Four

Oftentimes when the Buddha talked he liked to present sort of map of the whole path, or a description,
really, of the whole path as it unfolds from its most basic elements and beginnings and building blocks
all the way to complete, final liberation, the end of the path. He liked to often present that for his
students, for his listeners. I also get the sense, with the Buddha, that he liked to whet people’s appetites
in that presentation. So a little bit, that’s what I want to do tonight, really more in the sense of
describing a map, presenting a map, presenting a look at where this practice potentially can lead.

So I want to talk tonight about the four jhanas, what’s called the four jhanas, which are states of deep
samadhi, deep samatha, deep absorption and concentration. “Jhana” is a Pali word. In Sanskrit the word
is “dhyana.” I would just like to say, to start, to put a question out for you to hold lightly during the talk
and to kind of keep in the background. What happens when you hear about this stuff? What happens in
the mind? What’s the reaction? How are you listening? If one hears about states further along than we
are at the present moment, what does the mind do with that? Does it say, “It’s rubbish where I am now.
It’s worthless. It’s not worth anything. That’s what I want.” Does it dismiss my present experience?
Does it dismiss the present experience? Does it find something in a description of something that we
don’t already have, does it use that to put ourselves down in the present? It’s that inner critic again,
using whatever it can to kind of press down on the self and berate the self. Or sometimes we hear
something and it just sounds like – somehow we’re turned off. And if we’re turned off, what’s the
reason there? What’s going on there? So just to, a very light question, how are you listening? How are
we listening to this? And what’s happening as we listen? Just to notice the reactions.

In a way, this is very – we’ve been here, I don’t know, three, three and a half days or something. And
out of a five day retreat, I don’t particularly expect most of what I’m talking about tonight to be really
present much in your experience right now. It’s very early days we’re talking about. However, for some
people who have been here much longer, some people have a long history of this kind of practice, and
it will speak definitely to what’s in their experience. For others even in the days we’ve had so far there
have been glimpses of something that’s a little bit out of the ordinary experience that one is used to. So
all that may be possible. For the most part, for most of you tonight, it will just be a matter of kind of
sitting back and listening to something, listening to a description of where this might unfold. I’ve put
an enormous amount of material out just so far in the retreat, and for once, for the most part, you don’t
actually have to do much with this tonight. It’s just listen, sit back, and kind of hear about it.

This comfortable feeling, however it is, that I’ve been talking about and pointing to and we’ve been
encouraging, slowly, slowly, and in a nonlinear way, we begin to develop that. We begin to develop it.
As it’s developing, the mind begins to like it more and more; it’s comfortable, it’s pleasant, it’s
enjoyable, it’s easeful, whatever. Because of that, the mind can settle down in it more. As the mind
settles down in it more, it grows. You get this kind of feedback loop going on, and a kind of resonance
set up. Eventually it develops and it might become more steady. It might also really grow in intensity,
but it may not grow that much in intensity. There’s a word in Pali called “piti,” and that’s usually
translated as “rapture,” or sometimes as “pleasure,” sometimes as “delight,” but let’s use just the word
piti. It’s hard to say, to draw a dividing line, where that comfortable feeling that may be ever so humble
right now, where that begins to move into the territory where we can call it piti. Maybe it’s just a
spectrum; maybe there actually isn’t a dividing line. This comfortable feeling, we could call that piti.
But we could also say there are actually many types of piti. So even right now, this comfortable feeling,
if we had the time and went through every – “describe your comfortable feeling” – we’d get a lot of
different descriptions. Similarly with piti. So a lot of different ways it manifests, and a lot of different
strengths as well. Sometimes very unremarkable. Sometimes so strong it’s like being struck by
lightning; it’s unbearably intense, the kind of rapture, and words like “bliss” and “ecstasy” are not off
the mark. But piti can manifest any way; it could be a warmth, an opening, a tingling, a kind of pleasant
vibration, a lightness. Many, many qualities it can have, but the basic qualifier for it is that it’s a
pleasant feeling arising out of meditation. Even that, I’d have to qualify, because sometimes people get
it outside of meditation; it has more to do with an openness of being. One’s in nature, or listening to
music, or just emotionally very open, and that very openness of being allows the energy channels in the
body to open up, if we use that language. The energy flows and there’s pleasantness, there’s comfort
there, there’s piti there.

So this piti begins to come into the experience, and it can be sporadically at first, but it begins to
develop and begins to get a little more steady, and then a lot more steady. One has a couple of choices
as a meditator, and in a way one can also develop the capacity to do both. One is to keep the breath, as
I’ve been describing, as something that kind of nurtures and bathes that feeling. In a way, sometimes
the breath and the piti can kind of mix together, and they become almost indistinguishable, as if one is
breathing this piti, breathing this pleasant feeling. Or, one can let the breath go, and let it be very much
in the background or even lose touch with it, and the piti comes more to the fore. That becomes the
object of concentration; it’s the thing that the mind is focusing on. One begins to develop this, focus on
it, and enable it to spread and fill the whole body. So the whole body is actually saturated with a
pleasant feeling. Again, that could be extremely pleasant, or just a little bit pleasant. I’ll come back to
this. But actually that degree of intensity of it is less important than the fact that it’s spread and it’s
steady.

When this piti – this nice feeling, this pleasant feeling that’s come from meditation – when that’s steady
and staying minutes and longer, and it’s suffusing the whole body, and the mind is really, really
enjoying it, and the mind kind of absorbs into it, really rubs its nose into it, dissolves into it, gets inside
it, gets to know it, that state is called the first jhana, the first absorption or the first state of
concentration. The Buddha had very beautiful poetic images for the jhanas. I’ll just read you each as I
go through them. He’s talking about someone, “He enters” – could be she, of course – “He enters and
abides in the first jhana, and makes the rapture and pleasure drench, steep, fill and pervade this body, so
that there is no part of his whole body unpervaded by the rapture and pleasure. Just as a skilled bath
man or bath man’s apprentice heaps bath powder in a metal basin and, sprinkling it gradually with
water, kneads it until the moisture wets his ball of bath powder” – in those days you couldn’t go to the
supermarket and buy a bar of soap, there would be someone in the public baths mixing soap powder
into a ball for each individual bather, and they would mix it and give this thing to the person – “kneads
it until the moisture wets his ball of bath powder, soaks it and pervades it inside and out, yet the ball
itself does not ooze, so to he makes the rapture and pleasure drench, steep, fill and pervade this body,
so there is no part of his whole body unpervaded by the rapture and pleasure.” So the important thing is
– it’s interesting, it’s quite an active image. This person is really mixing something. Sometimes, with
this comfortable feeling – that, again, please remember, may be, for many people here, in the future –
one is actively kind of mixing that through the body, kind of pushing it. “How do my legs feel?”,
getting it down there, mixing it in the body. At other times it will be much more kind of hands off and
subtle, the way that one gets it to spread. It’s almost like just letting it spread, or opening up the
awareness, and then it spreads. But the Buddha chooses quite an active image, which is interesting.

One learns that. One learns to do that, and one does it over and over and over, and really begins to
enjoy it. That state begins to deepen. In time, it ripens into what’s called the second jhana, which is
quite similar except a couple things have changed. In the background, so to speak, in the first jhana –
there was this piti there – and in the background was a kind of happiness, a very deep happiness. But
the piti is so strong that oftentimes a meditator doesn’t notice even that there’s a lot of happiness there.
In the second jhana, what happens is the happiness comes to the fore, and the piti goes a little bit to the
background. The piti is very much still there, but what’s really prominent in the experience of the
second jhana is happiness – really unbelievable happiness, profound outpouring in the being, a very
deep and incredibly fulfilling happiness. The other factor that happens in the second jhana is that – in
the first jhana, for a lot of people, it’s still possible to use reflective thought and kind of evaluate how
the meditation is going. You can actually think about the breath, “Should I make it longer now?”, et
cetera. It’s what’s called applied and evaluating thought. That kind of disappears in the second jhana, in
the sense that the mind can’t follow a thought in that state. So thoughts, as something that the mind
follows, have kind of disappeared. There’s really nothing going on but this happiness. Beautiful welling
up of happiness. The Buddha has a very lovely image for this. “Just as though there were a mountain
lake whose waters welled up from below” – so you’ve got a mountain spring feeding a lake – “whose
waters welled up from below, and it had no inflow from east, west, north, or south, and would not be
replenished from time to time by showers of rain, then the cool fount of water welling up in the lake
would make the cool water drench, steep, fill and pervade the lake, so that there would be no part of the
whole lake unpervaded by cool water; so too he makes the rapture and pleasure” – he’s talking about
the rapture and happiness this time – “born of concentration, drench, steep, fill and pervade this body,
so that there is no part of this whole body unpervaded by the happiness and rapture.” You have to
remember they’re living in a very hot climate, so the idea of a cool lake is actually quite appealing.
[laughter] Whereas August in Devon… [laughter] But to listeners that would have been a very beautiful
– can you hear the beauty of the image? You’ve got this lake, and it’s just being fed, and in a way – I
find the poetic images incredibly precise, somehow, poetically. They don’t work for everyone, but
they’re really quite precise.

Again, a meditator gets used to that. This all really takes time. A meditator gets used to that, and gets
used to really drenching, really absorbing in that. After a time, it’s almost as if the happiness
completely fulfills the being. So what we want is happiness, and here it is just like a waterfall, or an
inner spring of it, and we have enough. The heart feels like, “I have enough.” Totally fulfilled by the
happiness. And then something happens: it begins to mellow. It’s like the happiness begins to mellow.
It goes through a couple of stages. It passes through a stage where there’s this profound sense of
contentment. It’s interesting – if we say “rapture” or “ecstasy” or “bliss,” describing the first jhana, and
then we say “contentment begins to move into the third jhana,” most people would say rapture and bliss
and ecstasy sound much better. But actually there’s something about this contentment; it’s much more
satisfying. It’s something that we don’t really taste in our everyday life. These are states that are beyond
the emotional range and certainly the range of consciousness that most human beings would be used to.
It’s a profound sense of satisfaction, fulfillment, contentment, that’s also very, very peaceful. It’s
exquisitely peaceful. That begins to deepen, and the sense of peacefulness begins to really come to the
fore. At this point, the rapture has sort of faded from the experience. So the sort of baths of ecstasy, et
cetera, has faded, and what’s there is just a very mellow, indescribably beautiful, sweet, tender
peacefulness that’s just suffusing everything. The Buddha, again, a similar kind of image: “Just as in a
pond of blue or red or white lotuses, some lotuses that are born and grow in the water thrive immersed
in the water, without rising out of it, and cool water drenches, steeps, fills and pervades them to their
tips and their roots, so that there is no part of all those lotuses unpervaded by cool water, so too he
makes the pleasure” – really the peacefulness, the happiness – “divested of rapture” – the rapture is
gone – “drench, steep, fill and pervade this body, so that there is no part of this whole body unpervaded
by the pleasure divested of rapture.”

In a way, each of these stages has kind of gradations within it. It can be that that peacefulness begins to
kind of expand out. So it very much starts with contentment and the peacefulness is here, and then it
kind of expands out and it’s almost as if one is in a realm of peacefulness, so that when the birds sing
out there or crow or whatever they do, they’re singing of peace. They’re expressing peace. Everything
gets colored that way; everything is speaking of peace. It’s very hard, in that kind of state, to be
disturbed by sensory jolts, et cetera; you definitely might hear them still, but a sense of peace is
pervading everything. Again, one develops that, and this really takes time, et cetera, and eventually that
deepens, too. One moves to the fourth jhana. One is almost submerged or cocooned in a state of total
stillness. The mind and the body have kind of dissolved in stillness. The body very much just – all
that’s there is the sense of exquisite stillness. The mind, too, dissolved in stillness. That stillness,
though, is very bright; there’s a real sense of incredible aliveness. Sometimes it’s visually very bright.
Sometimes all these states are visually very bright, like white, golden light. But there’s an incredible
sense of aliveness and presence, and a sense of really being there. This moment is very alive, very
present. It’s also very refined. So what’s happening here is the states are getting more and more refined.
In a way, rapture, relative to the stillness of what I’m talking about now, is something quite gross – it’s
very buzzy and sort of “yehaw” kind of thing. [laughter] This is something very, very exquisite and
incredibly refined. It’s very, very subtle; extremely subtle. One of the things that’s happening as the
mind deepens through this is the mind itself is becoming more refined. It’s able to notice and stay with
very, very refined objects. So the peacefulness in the third jhana is very, very refined. It would be hard
– it’s almost like we train the mind to be able to stay with that degree of refinement. Now, sometimes,
we hear about this or whatever and we want to kind of rush through all this. I feel it’s more useful if
one just spends time in each stage and lets it ripen like a fruit ripening. It’s just ready to move into the
next stage. Sometimes you can kind of encourage it and nudge it, but for the most part it just ripens.
The Buddha’s image for that one: “He sits pervading this body with a pure bright mind” – pure bright
awareness – “so there is no part of his whole body unpervaded by the pure bright mind. Just as though
a man were sitting covered from the head down with a white cloth, so that there would be no part of his
whole body unpervaded by the white cloth; so too he sits pervading this body with a pure bright mind,
so that there is no part of his whole body unpervaded by that.” So it’s interesting, it does sound a lot
less dramatic, but actually, without exception, a meditator finds them more fulfilling as they go deeper.

Sometimes people get into states like these but they’re not – it’s all a bit amorphous. It’s quite
important to know “this is this state, this is this state, that’s that state,” there’s something quite
important about that, rather than just “I’m in a state that really feels extraordinary and very good.”
There is something about knowing each one. They can be experienced as kind of the mind making a
quantum leap from one state to another, you’re really in something different now, or they can be
experienced as a continuum, both. But it’s really important to know them as something separate and
really know, “Ah, this is the second jhana,” et cetera.
I mentioned that sometimes, quite often, people get secondary effects, what’s called “nimittas” in Pali.
The most common one is bright, white light. Some of you may even be experiencing that now. The
mind produces kind of bright, white light. It’s just a sign that the mind is deepening in the
concentration. Sometimes these can be a bit of a distraction, but if a meditator can blend them in with
the rapture or the happiness, et cetera, they can be really useful. But they’re not essential to what’s
going on. Sometimes they get a little over-emphasized in the teaching of all this. What is essential is
the suffusion. The whole body steeped in this, the pervading of the whole body. If you notice every
time the Buddha talks about it, he uses those words – drench, suffuse, steep. That’s actually essential.
The other essential thing is the steadiness. The word “jhana” is related to a word “jhayati,” which is the
word for the steadiness of a candle flame. So there’s something very, very steady in the state. Those
factors, the suffusion and the steadiness, are actually more important than intensity. Mind-blowing
ecstasy, for example, is not as important as the steadiness or suffusion. Also, interestingly, the degree of
absorption – some people say it’s not a jhana until someone could chop your head off and you wouldn’t
realize. Maybe there is that degree of absorption, and I guess that could come in handy. [laughter] But
actually that’s not the significant factor. There will be a continuum of absorption; sometimes one feels
more absorbed, sometimes less. Of course one is trying to be more absorbed, but that’s not so
important. One also tends to assume that the more intense and the more absorbed the better, but not
always. Someone might have extreme absorption, extreme intensity of experience, but there’s actually
not much wisdom or difference happening in a person’s life. So those aren’t really the key factors.

It’s possible, and I would say it’s strongly, strongly preferable with all of this, to actually – a meditator
can learn to develop mastery of each of these states, so what that means is that one is able to sit down,
or stand, or walk, or whatever it is, and just say, “Bliss.” And there it comes. Or just say, “Stillness.”
And there it comes. Just a very slight intention, and there it is, and then one is able to sustain that and
absorb into it. That might sound incredibly far-fetched but it’s actually not, and in fact there are people
in this room right now who have been here for a while or doing this kind of practice for a while and are
quite able to do that. A mastery at being able to enter, being able to come out of it, being able to sustain
it, et cetera. So even possible to go for long walks and be in one of these states and the body just kind
of knows what to do, where to put the feet, et cetera. This is all very, very possible. That degree of
mastery is, I think, really, really preferable, in terms of making a long-term difference to one’s life, over
a kind of glimpse of an experience, which can be helpful or can be not helpful. If an experience, if a
jhanic experience, is a one-off – like you had this one experience that was like “wow” and then never
again – that’s when it’s dangerous in terms of attachment, because the mind just went, “Wow, that was
so different. I just want to get back there.” Once it begins starting to be a bit more regular and a bit
more accessible, the problem of attachment is actually not that great at all. The Buddha also
emphasized this mastery and the kind of letting things ripen. He has this image of a foolish cow that’s
grazing in a field in the mountains, and then this foolish cow thinks, “I wonder what that field is like,”
and it has to go down this mountainside and into a ravine to get to the other one. It goes down there, out
of curiosity for the other field, and then it can’t get out of the ravine. It can’t get to the new field, and it
can’t get back to the old one. So there’s something – the idea is just stay where you are and let things
ripen. Part of this mastery that’s involved, that I’m saying is quite possible with long-term dedication to
this, is that one gets the sense that these are kind of like frequencies or radio waves that are in the air all
the time. What one is doing is sort of tuning one’s mind, tuning one’s radio tuner, in to a certain
frequency. You tune it into rapture, or you tune it into happiness or peacefulness or whatever, and you
just abide with that. So it can be a little like opening your wardrobe and you’ve got clothes hanging and
you say, “Hmm, that one.” But the sense of what’s going on begins to change, and it moves to the very
real sense that they’re there all the time. They’re there all the time and it’s more a sense of tuning into
something. There’s something quite important about that shift.
Something with all this: attitude. I’ll remind you of the question that I started with. Just, how are you
hearing this right now? How are you hearing this? For a practitioner who is going through all this or
has the possibility to go through all this, even then attitude is really, really important. It’s very common
to kind of grasp at this word “jhana” or want to have a badge that says “first jhana” or something. The
ego can get a hold of it that way; it’s very easy. Much better to regard this as a kind of lifetime
deepening. Over a lifetime, we’re deepening in this beautiful, beautiful exploration of the deepening of
consciousness, the deepening of samadhi. There’s just a kind of lifetime commitment to it, as part of
our whole practice. Slowly, slowly, these things can come to us if we’re interested in them and if we
put the work in. I, actually, when I’m working with people one-on-one, I almost never use the word
jhana. Oftentimes it’s a word that people grab hold of in the wrong way and make too much of. So I
actually talk much more in terms of “How’s the happiness doing? Are you able to pervade the
comfortable feeling?” I introduce the word jhana much, much later, when things are much more settled
and normalized, et cetera.

It’s also important to realize that for someone who goes into this there will still be the whole continuum
of experience. All that is still – the whole continuum of difficulty and the effort level, I think is what
I’m trying to say – that will still be very much part of the experience, a part of the practice. So
sometimes one finds oneself in a beautiful state, and it feels completely effortless, totally suffused and
right there and just totally effortless. Sometimes, in fact more often, perhaps, there’s a degree of
tweaking going on. Someone told me, in fact a lot of people told me today, that I’ve been using words
they don’t understand, that apparently are American words. [laughter] So if I talk American, say
something. Is tweaking okay? [laughter] Okay. There’s a degree of tweaking going on, and what I mean
by that is that one is still doing some subtle work in the absorption, just a little bit more of this, a little
bit less, relax a little bit, working with all these factors that I’ve been throwing out. It’s just on a more
subtle level. That’s going on. Sometimes it feels effortless, sometimes there’s a degree of tweaking
going on. Sometimes there are niggles going on, even, and you’re trying – one is working to do the best
that one can and iron them out. Sometimes the hindrances are sort of around, but they’re not prominent.
It’s as if they’re like a little pack of sort of terrier dogs, but they’re just outside the door, sort of
yapping, yapping, yapping. They’re not quite in the foreground of the experience. Sometimes there’s a
full-blown hindrance attack, multiple hindrance attack. All that is the practice of samadhi, even the
practice of jhana practice. It’s all involved. So expect that. There’s a subtle work going on quite a lot of
the time, and sometimes not so subtle at all.

Okay, so, hearing about this, and even before we heard about this, just in terms of the practice we’re
doing, this is a question that’s come up from a few people and it’s very important. Is this escapism? Am
I escaping into some kind of la-la land? Am I not dealing with my psychological difficulties that need
to be dealt with? This is a very important question. It comes out of a lot of integrity and honesty. It’s
important that we ask this question. I touched on it, I think, in the talk on the first evening. You have to
see – to repeat a little bit – you have to see what we’re doing on this retreat in context. It’s one kind of
slice out of the whole of what practice is. We’re just emphasizing that slice for the purpose of this
retreat. See it in context. Am I able, as a practitioner, am I able to meet my emotional – what’s difficult
emotionally? Am I able to open to what’s difficult emotionally? Do I know how to do that? Can I draw
near? Can I open? Can I touch and hold what’s going on that’s difficult, emotionally, physically,
psychologically, et cetera? Am I able to do that? And am I able to put that down and go into something
else? Am I also able to kind of understand what might be feeding that difficulty, and understand it in a
way that defuses it? All of that is part of practice. We’re just emphasizing one part right now. If I’m
able to do all that, then the question of “am I avoiding or not avoiding?” becomes quite secondary. It’s
like, sometimes I can do this, and sometimes I can do that. And if I’ve chosen to, I don’t know, bliss out
for a while, and that’s the wrong choice, it’ll show itself. It’ll show itself. The fact of one’s ability to
move between the two gives more freedom. One is less worried about making the wrong choice there.
You can do both. It’s not that one exclusively does one or the other. So, is it escapism? The Buddha
actually calls this an escape. The first jhana is an escape from the hindrances. It’s an escape from sloth
and torpor and restlessness and doubt and greed and anger and aversion. It’s an escape from all that
that’s difficult. The second jhana is an escape from being caught up in thought or from following
thought. The third jhana is an escape from the relative grossness of rapture. They’re escapes. Is it an
escape in terms of our connection with other people? Absolutely not. What one realizes as one goes
deeply into samadhi practice is that there is really love in this. The samadhi, what just starts as the
comfortable feeling, when it grows and particularly when it reaches the happiness stage, it’s actually
got a lot of love in it. There’s a real quality of love kind of mixed in with the happiness. As that goes
deeper into the territory of the third jhana, there’s a real tenderness in there. The heart is extremely
tender and open with all of that. All of this makes us, in a way, more emotionally available – to
ourselves, to others, and to life. We’re being bathed in this love, in this tenderness, and it really opens
up the availability in our life. Having access, in one’s life, to this kind of independent sense of
happiness and well-being gives a tremendous confidence. We just feel a confidence that I can be happy.
I can be happy, and that’s a big deal. It’s a big deal to know that I can be happy, and not only that, I can
actually be happy in an independent way, not so needy. It doesn’t make us cold and cut off, but we’re
just not so needy.

Again, as the samadhi develops, there’s a real faith that comes up. You see, “Oh, my experience totally
matches what the Buddha said. And then my next experience totally matches what the Buddha...” And
it keeps going. You think, “Well, maybe if this much is true, one, two, three, four, et cetera, it’s
probably all true.” It gives a real, real faith. There’s incredible healing in all of this. Any even pre-
jhanic samadhi, what we’re mostly dealing with on this retreat, just that bathing the body, bathing the
sense of well-being, that healing that comes from that – it just deepens, it just deepens. Incredibly
healing for the body, incredibly healing for the mind, the emotional body, the nervous system, all of
that. A lot of healing here. A lot of people find their intuitive capacities growing; there’s something
about this that opens up the intuition quite deeply. The sensitivity to life is also opened.

Tomorrow I’m going to talk a lot about the relationship of concentration, of samatha, and insight. I just
want to touch very briefly this evening on a little bit of that. All this that I’ve just talked about has a
dramatic effect – or should have a dramatic effect – on our relationship with greed and sense desire
and also on aversion. One has something here that’s actually a lot better, to put it grossly, a lot better
than what one can get through sense pleasure. There’s less of this kind of hunger in the mind to go out
and – one just has enough. That’s a shift that particularly starts happening around the second jhana.
There’s a real re-evaluating of where the happiness comes from in life, and it really sinks down into the
being where the happiness is. Sometimes, and again I don’t know if this sounds crass or not, but
sometimes just taking, say, the first three jhanas – I wonder what that’s worth in money terms.
[laughter] It’s a ridiculous question, of course, but I don’t know. Millions? Billions? Whatever you
could buy with money won’t give you that same satisfaction. A massive yacht that’s moored in the
Caribbean, with waiters and people who fan you. [laughter] And bring you those cocktails with
umbrellas in them. Imagine you had that, whenever you wanted. You had a private jet that could fly you
there whenever you got a little stressed out at work. It’s just [snaps], “Jeeves?” [laughter] And along
comes a chauffeur and takes you to your private jet and off you go. The azure, clear waters, the
beautiful, blue sky, et cetera. It doesn’t compare. It doesn’t compare. I don’t know how much money
one would need to have all that. Sorry to be crass, but.

One of the other insights, in the third jhana, there’s a degree of peacefulness and one realizes there’s a
kind of wishlessness that comes with that peacefulness. One is totally satisfied, totally contented, and
with that, one doesn’t wish for anything. One is not wanting anything more or anything less. An insight
drops: peacefulness comes from wishlessness, from not wishing, from having no wishes. That’s the
deepest kind of peacefulness. With all of these jhanas – I’ll touch on this at some other point – but
there’s a progressively getting to know less self. There’s less self around. It’s like the self is just getting
more and more in the background and being quiet; it’s not being so built up. The Buddha said develop
samadhi. Develop samadhi. When the samadhi is really developed, “the mind can move mountains,” he
said, “let alone measly ignorance.” To move ignorance means to be completely enlightened. He said
once samadhi is developed, it’s like that’s easy. It’s a tremendous resource in our lives. Sometimes we
think, “Well, how is that going to apply to my daily life?” Actually, with the practice of this, it’s
possible to have things like rapture, comfortable feeling, piti, and even happiness or more,
peacefulness, et cetera, as qualities – maybe not full jhanic absorption as one’s moving through the
business of the day, but as qualities that are actually quite accessible. One begins to be able to just draw
on them in the middle of a difficult situation. One just draws on that quality, and it changes one’s
relationship with the situation. That’s actually much more accessible than one might think.

There was once – I can’t remember the whole story – but there was once a novice monk called Kunda,
and someone had said to him, “You Buddhist monks and nuns, you’re addicted to lying and cheating
and stealing and killing and sense pleasure and greed and all of that.” Being very new, he kind of didn’t
know what to respond. So he went back to the Buddha and the Buddha said to him, “Well, if someone
says that, you should say no, we’re not addicted to that. But we are addicted to four forms of pleasure-
seeking. My disciples are addicted to four forms of pleasure-seeking.” He uses this word “addicted.”
“We’re addicted to four forms of pleasure-seeking. Those are the pleasures of the first, second, third
and fourth jhana. We’re addicted to that.” He goes on to say, “Because they are entirely conducive to
disenchantment, to awakening, to nirvana.” Entirely conducive to nirvana – “This is a pleasure that I
will allow myself. This is a pleasure that leads to nirvana,” he says. He’s very, very clear about that. He
goes on to say, in the same passage, “There are four fruits that can be expected for one who is given to
these four forms of pleasure-seeking. They are the four stages of enlightenment, the four stages of
awakening.” That’s what’s to be expected. He’s very clear: pursue this because it leads to awakening.
Develop this pleasure because it leads to awakening.

So this question of attachment, it’s very rarely a problem. I’ll put it that way. There are cases where it
is. But it’s very rarely a problem. I think I used the image of a ladder in one of the talks – it’s a little bit
like, what’s quite common, if I’m working one-on-one with someone, and they’re going through this,
they reach the level of the third jhana, and this exquisite peacefulness, and then they – I have to prod
them a little and check, “Hey, are you still keeping up the first jhana?” Because they look back and all
that ecstasy and all that buzz seems like, “I don’t want that.” It seems gross. And the mind kind of
withdraws from it. There’s a natural letting go of the lower states, and that progressively builds. To
follow that image of the ladder, it’s almost like one is grabbing this rung up there, which enables one to
let go of the rung down there. Then one grabs the rung above, progressively, progressively. So there is a
way that the path of samatha, this unfolding of all this in its depths, leads, in itself, all the way to
awakening. It’s one of the roots that are available, that lead all the way to nirvana. But always it’s part
of the whole path. All the factors that I began the retreat talking about, generosity, ethics,
lovingkindness, insight, all that, that’s always part of the path. Practitioners vary in – let’s put it this
way – in the degree that they emphasize samatha. Some people emphasize it very, very little, and some
people emphasize it really a lot, and some people are kind of medium. That’s all fine, and that depends
on individual personalities and predispositions and that kind of stuff. But it is possible just in and of
itself, if you’re reflecting on the samatha in the right way, that it leads all the way to awakening. On
this retreat, we’re really emphasizing the samatha. We’re really emphasizing that slice of the path.
Tomorrow I’m going to talk about the relationship of concentration, of samatha, and insight, and how
they feed each other. That’s really what goes on – the samatha feeds the insight in a very deep way, and
the insight feeds the samatha. They’re mutually reinforcing.

So, a little bit of a map. I think what I really want to say is that actually this – what I’ve described
tonight is more available than it might sound. I don’t know how it sounds. It will sound different ways
to different people. But it’s more available than one might think. It’s there for a practitioner if one
wants it.

How are you doing? Are you tired? I could open it up for questions now, or should we not?
Let’s take a little time and do that, if you’re not too tired, then. Any questions about what I’ve just been
talking about?

[inaudible question]

Rob: Second jhana? In the first jhana, you’ve got a lot of physical rapture and physical ecstasy. In the
second jhana, what comes to be more prominent is happiness, the quality of joy or happiness. Very,
very deep happiness. That sort of takes the center stage, and one just absorbs in that happiness. The
rapture or physical ecstasy is still there, but it’s – it’s not in the background but it’s not as prominent as
the happiness. The other factor that sort of defines the second jhana is that there may be a little flicker
of thought or an image, this or that kind of sparking in the mind, but it’s not possible to follow a
thought, or to think a thought, so to speak. Thought has kind of gone, and happiness is really filling the
experience.

[inaudible question]

Rob: Preconceptions getting in the way? Yeah, yeah. It’s definitely a potential issue. There’s two words,
one is preconceptions and one is expectations. Yesterday in the talk, I very briefly talked about having
one’s mind so much on the results that one is neglecting paying attention to the causes. What are the
causes? The thing that we’ve been doing, nurturing, playing with the breath, playing with the mind,
nurturing that pleasant feeling. If I’m thinking, “It should be like this,” that’s really going to get in the
way. In terms of preconceptions, that can work both ways. Sometimes, yes, one kind of gets into a state
and wants to paint it in a way that, “Now I’ve got that first jhana badge.” But in other ways it can be
helpful in just kind of – not freaking someone out, when they have a new experience. “Oh, this is
referred to, this is common, this is something that people have been experiencing for thousands of
years. It has a context. It has a framework.” So I’m aware of that, but I think there’s a benefit for
providing that framework and that map. I remember doing solitary retreats in the past, and working on
samatha, getting into some states which I only realized “oh, this is whatever jhana” because I had read
the description before. Then I could kind of work with that and relate it to what I’d experienced before.
So it can be a problem and it can also be useful. As I said at the beginning, the Buddha seemed fond of
doing that, so, humbly I follow his example. But it’s a good point.

[inaudible question]

Rob: That’s a loaded one, yeah. Did everyone hear that? “Are we saying you can’t get enlightened
without the jhanas?” Am I saying, or…? [laughter] The Buddha said there’s no jhana without wisdom,
but he also said there’s no wisdom without jhana. The degree of that might vary. In other words, what
my teacher usually said is that you can’t be enlightened without an experience of at least the first jhana.
I don’t know, to be honest. I tend – if it’s available for someone, I really tend to emphasize it, because
what I see – and I’ll talk about this tomorrow – what I see is that they’re so good for insight, even more
than they are for just juice on the path. They do such a lot for insight and for allowing insight to really
deepen and take root in the being, and for different kinds of understanding to unfold. I wouldn’t like to
say – it would involve working with a lot of people who actually reach enlightenment and seeing how
many of them didn’t do that. There are people at Gaia House who have reached stages of
enlightenment. I want to say that, actually. That happens here on long-term retreat. But I haven’t
worked with enough of them to know if that’s the case. That’s all I would say. So I don’t feel it’s for me
to say. I tend to emphasize them when they’re available for a person. I never push someone into this. I
never – if they don’t want to do it, that’s totally fine. I always respect that. But if it’s available and
they’re interested, I gently tend to encourage it because I see that it’s really good for insight. That’s
most of the reason why I would emphasize it. So I’m not really answering your question, but. Is that
okay? Okay.

[inaudible question]

Rob: Yes. Thank you. Yes. They are very – I briefly made that point, it’s quite or relatively common for
a person to be meditating quite a long time and get what could be quite intense experiences but they’re
vague and not really defined; they don’t really know if it’s this jhana or that jhana. I think it’s
important, I’ll go into this a little bit perhaps as part of the context of tomorrow’s talk, to be very
precise and know. It doesn’t mean there can’t be some variation from time to time in how each one
feels, but there is a lot of precision. The Buddha is extremely precise in his teaching. He’s a very
precise teacher. [questioner continues] Is there movement? Yes. In fact, sorry, I forgot to say. Once one
has mastered, one can kind of ping-pong around at will, so you’re in bliss and you just think, “Okay,
stillness.” And you ping-pong there. Then you say, “Okay, some happiness.” And you can just spend
your time – very possible. Really, really possible. Totally. Yeah.

[inaudible question]

Rob: I’m not the only one who does it. I’m really not the only one. The Dharma is very young in the
West. You have to think back – where are we now? 2008. When did the Dharma – this kind of tradition,
insight meditation tradition, took root in the West in the middle to late ‘70s. You’re talking about 30
years old. It came through certain, two or three particular streams of traditions which tended to really
not emphasize samatha. I totally respect that. But that’s what took hold. As the Dharma is growing –
and it’s very, very young. You think about a 2600 year old tradition, it’s been in the West for 30 years.
This is baby time. We are baby time now. There are all kinds of factors – how is Dharma meeting
modern psychotherapy and psychology? That’s really shaping things. How is Dharma, this tradition,
meeting other traditions, like Tibetan traditions, et cetera? There’s a whole kind of birthing process
going on. It’s very early days. My guess is that in the next 5, 10, 20 years there will be lots of different
strands available to practitioners. Different people emphasizing one and the other. It will be much more
available, much more mainstream. It’s starting to happen already. It’s already starting to happen.
Historically, there are reasons – it’s more to do with, for the most part, which particular streams were
the really popular streams that took root when the Dharma or insight meditation originally came in the
70s.

Questioner: I was just wondering, the way that we’re practicing in the West, we tend to have busy lives
and come to a retreat once or twice a year. Sort of short-term. Do you see a potential danger with our
tendency to grasp at quick fixes, that we might embrace this stand of practice and forget all about
perhaps other strands like compassion, or do you think it can be a real tool in developing compassion?

Rob: I think it can be a real tool. Like I said, it brings compassion. There’s no question about it; one is
just more available. They kind of – the jhanas themselves are infused with that quality. Real love and
tenderness are in there. It’s also not a quick fix, this path – it takes a lot of work, don’t get me wrong.
You can see. Has this been hard work? [laughter] It’s been hard work. That doesn’t mean it’s not
enjoyable and can’t be nice a lot of the time, but it’s still, even when it’s going well, it’s still hard work.
There’s an aspect to it that’s hard work. I suppose that’s possible, for someone to over-emphasize this at
the expense of another part of the path. But one could do that with any part of the path, and like I said a
few times on this retreat, the Dharma is something very wide. This retreat, we’re just emphasizing one
part. We have to see things in context. It’s almost like, being able to do different things, being able to
embrace different parts – there might be periods of one’s life where one is emphasizing one particular
strand of that, and periods of one’s life where one is emphasizing another, and that’s fine. People will
differ in terms of how much concentration they can do in the middle of a very busy life. Some people
are completely fine with doing it in the middle of a busy city and going to work and commuting and all
that. Some people, less so. But it’s still, I would say, much more available than one would think. Does
that answer? Yeah. Okay.

Questioner: You talked about being very precise. This is more an observation than question. To me, it
felt very intellectual. I find that quite difficult to relate to.

Rob: The factor of precision? Yeah.

Questioner: That it has to be so precise.

Rob: Okay. What could we replace that with? I guess what I’m saying is there’s a real difference, say,
between the first and the second jhana. It’s important to know when you’re in one and in the other,
that’s all. That’s not an intellectual process; that’s a really embodied, like, you just know, like you know
your best friend from your husband or whatever. You know the difference.

Questioner: So it’s not important to know the name of it? Know that it’s the first or second or third
jhana, just that it’s different?

Rob: Yeah, that it’s different. Like I said, I rarely – when I’m working with someone one-on-one, I
rarely use the word “jhana.” I wait for the person to use their own language, and then I’ll pick up on
that language. If you start using the word “joy” or “delightful” I’ll just mirror that back to you. I’ll use
your language. But in the back of my mind I’m kind of thinking, “Okay, there are discrete things which
you know. There’s this, there’s this. And then later on you can map them onto first, second.” But that’s
much later. By that point it’s a very intimate experience to you and very embodied.

Questioner: Just a question about the actual practice. You said yesterday in the group interview that we
had that when there’s this kind of bliss, this pleasure, to really see when you’re holding back and really
go for it. Then you said the intensity isn’t necessarily as important as the steadiness and that it’s all-
pervasive. So it’s just a kind of question about that, whether to keep going with that like you said
yesterday in group, when the intensity is growing and growing and growing, or whether to sit in a space
where it’s slightly less intense? [inaudible]

Rob: Can you hear that at the back? Okay, so the question is, having said that the intensity is not that
important – she’s saying when she kind of surrenders to this really lovely feeling it gets really intense.
She can do that, but it’s really intense. Or she can kind of spread it in the body and work on spreading
it. Both are important. There will be a kind of patch of time where it goes for a period where it’s almost
too intense, a little bit. But you’re just going through a phase there, and the whole movement of this is
towards more mellowness. So one just has to – you know, sometimes it’s unbearably pleasant. You just
have to weather that period. The more you surrender to it, the more you won’t get hung up there and it
will just move. Go into it, but be very open, and work also on spreading it. It will be intense, but it’s
okay. Don’t worry about the movement inside; if your body actually starts shaking see if you can keep
it still, and open up inside, open up the energy channels inside and let it move inside, but see if you can
keep the physical body still. You’re not disturbing anyone at all; it’s quite a common feeling to think
it’s a bit too much, but it’s fine. It’s fine. Okay?

Questioner: You’ve been saying this is a nonlinear process, not just the jhanas but the whole samadhi.
[inaudible]

Rob: There is a progression, and in that sense, it’s linear. But within that, it’s almost like you’ll be zig-
zagging up – it’s going to be nonlinear within that larger linearity. In other words, some days you’re
going to feel great, and the next sitting you feel it’s terrible. That’s very common. Then it’s kind of
middling. But generally where you are one year, you’re in a different place the next year, or the next
month, or whatever it is. Okay? All right.

8: 2008-08-12 Fourth Morning Instructions

A little bit of review. First thing, forget what I said last night. [laughter] In the sense of that word
“jhana.” Like I said, I don’t actually use it that much when I’m teaching, and I haven’t used it so far on
the retreat in terms of what we’re doing and what we’re building. Just to relate to what we’re talking
about, the breath, the body, can we nurture the comfortable feeling, a comfortable feeling however that
is. It often can be grabbed the wrong way, or in an unhelpful way. So just forget that. What we’re
dealing with now is just continuing the practice.

So to review. So far, three aspects that we can play with. The first is the breath, and the quality of the
breath. Does it want to be long, is it helpful for the breath to be long, is it more helpful for it to be short,
is it better stronger or more subtle, is it smooth or rough? Really one aspect of what we can play with is
to engage with that, the quality of the breath, and just to experiment with that. Second one was
breathing – conceiving of the breath as coming in and out of different areas of the body. So instead of
the usual conception of the breath coming in here and going down in the lungs and going out – which is
totally fine, of course – conceiving with it in much more creative ways, much more unusual ways,
perhaps. Including, in that, for some people – again, this is so individual; different people will be
picking up different things in all of this. In a way, that’s why I’m putting out all this different stuff.
Someone will grab this piece, someone will grab that piece, and it’s all fine. But for some people the
conceiving of the breath as sort of something all around the body, that the body is just kind of osmosing
in and out, that can be a very helpful way of conceiving the breath. There’s the quality of the breath,
and the way we conceive of the breath. And then the third factor that we can experiment with, play
with, is the effort level, and so to speak how heavy or light the attention is. The attention can be really
kind of probing, or much more receptive, almost as if the mind receives the touch of the breath. It’s just
receiving it, it’s open. The mind can be quite tight, holding the body sense quite tightly, and sometimes
that’s really appropriate, or it can be really loose. We’re responding to this, playing with this. We can
melt into the breath. The awareness melts into the breath, or it kind of probes it or holds it. Playing with
that sense, especially the sense of the effort level. So those are three aspects to play with. That’s
absolutely plenty. In fact you probably can’t do all of it at once anyway, but just to take a little piece
and experiment.

In a way, to sum all of that up in a nutshell, it’s just be with the breath, be with the experience of the
breath in the body, however you feel it. That’s going to vary for different individuals. However you feel
the breath, that’s what you’re with. If I’m going on about breath energies and blah blah blah, and it
doesn’t make any sense, that’s fine. What do you feel when you breathe in? What do you feel when you
breathe out? What do you feel in between the breaths, when you’re neither breathing in nor out? That’s
your experience, and that’s what you go with. How can I make that experience more comfortable, just a
little bit more comfortable? It’s actually that simple. If something I’m putting out is feeling like, “I’m
really not getting that,” don’t latch onto that as something to make a problem of. It’s very, very
common for the mind to want to do that. Just take – what does the breath feel like for me, right now,
and can I make that more comfortable?

I remember saying my teacher, Ajahn Geoff, six months at least before he even began to – every day,
like a six month retreat in his monastery. Every day, hearing about this. Not having a clue what they
were talking about. And then just beginning, after six months, to have a clue. I would really call him a
meditation master. With that, to really be contented with what you have, in terms of the comfortable
feeling. Sometimes it’ll be a little stronger, sometimes it won’t be, sometimes it won’t be there at all.
Just to be contented and to nourish that, focusing on the positive. So that is plenty and in fact it’s more
than enough.

Very optional this morning, another thing to play with. That is in the realm of perception, or with the
whole factor of perception. A couple of mornings ago, we did a guided meditation, breathing in
different parts of the body. Well, I can’t actually remember exactly which points I did, but it’s possible
to sit there in meditation and feel the breath coming up through the feet, up the body. It’s possible.
Perhaps down again, or perhaps up and out the head. It’s also possible, five seconds later, to feel the
breath going in the top of the head and down the body and out the feet, or back up to the top of the
head. Which of those is right? Which of those is the real one? Or are they both going on at the same
time? What’s going on here? In a way, we can see what we want to see. We’re moving towards being
able to see what we want to see. This could, what I’ve just said about the breath, it could bring up a
whole lot of doubt, and you say, “I knew it, this is all just mind games, et cetera,” but actually there’s a
lot of potentially very deep insight here into the nature of perception – extremely important.

Perception. I’ll talk more about this tonight. Perception. As a factor of the mind, the mind perceives
things. It perceives things all the time. Part of that process of perception is labeling – microphone,
carpet, clock, zabutons. Part of that is labeling. So part of what we can do is, one is applying the label
“breath” or “breath energy,” whatever you want to say, to the bodily experience. Not necessarily the in
and out breath, but start playing with applying the label “breath” to the bodily experience. Again, just
playing, experimenting, with doing that, experiencing all the parts of the body as breath energy. So, if
right now, or when you’re sitting in meditation, if the head was breath energy, what kind of breath
energy would that be? It might feel good, like it’s flowing, like it’s open. It might feel tight, like there’s
a constriction there, not such good breath energy. But you’re looking at it in terms of it being breath
energy, labeling it that way. If we keep that up, just keep labeling the bodily experience as breath – so,
these head sensations as breath – and you do that consistently, eventually the experience of the head
changes. You actually have a different experience of the head. You can do that with all the different
parts of the body, and see how that labeling changes the experience. The actual physical experience
changes with the mental label. Again, we can do that with the body as a whole. We can do that with the
total sense of the body.

There’s a lot to do with insight here. This is really optional; remember, everything I’ve said is optional.
Just take what you can. We might be sitting in meditation, opening up the practice a little more to
include more insight aspects, and there’s some pain in the body or constriction or discomfort. One feels
that. What would it be to let the breath go and just be with that experience – say I have some pain in my
back, some constriction, constricted energy in the back. And one is just really touching that experience,
but with the agenda of really allowing it, allowing it to be what it is. So it’s just unpleasant experience.
It’s just unpleasant experience in the moment. One is there with an awareness that’s very, very
allowing. The emphasis is on the allowing, total allowing for it to be what it is, unpleasant. In a way,
one is softening one’s reaction, one’s relationship with it. Because usually the relationship would be
one of, “It’s unpleasant, I want to get rid of it.” There’s a kind of normal reaction to push away what’s
unpleasant. One is just allowing, allowing, softening that relationship. What happens to it when we do
that? What happens to the unpleasant feeling? This is something to explore. Sometimes we’re aware of
an unpleasant feeling, a pain or a constriction, and you can actually see what’s going on in the mind.
Just start seeing it in a different way. We get so roped in to seeing it as pain and my pain and the whole
problem of it. What if we just saw it as a sensation that the mind is labeling “pain?” You see this
process going on, sensation, pain, labeling. One is seeing it with more space and more non-attachment.
We begin to see that process happening in the mind. What happens when we see it?

I’ll expand on this tonight, this whole nature of perception. In the Dharma we talk a lot about bare
attention and seeing things as they are, but it’s not quite as simple as it seems. Does what I see, even the
pleasantness or unpleasantness of what I see and what I experience, does that depend on how I look at
it? Does it depend on how I look at it? Is it a given, or does it depend on how I look at it?

If we go back, also, and speak about the hindrances, sometimes there’s restlessness in meditation, it
feels very agitated, or a little bit agitated. Sometimes it’s possible to have a sense of – or invite a sense
of more space around the restlessness. Here’s restlessness, I feel it in the body, I feel it in the mind.
Sometimes even opening the eyes and getting a sense of space, it’s almost like, is that space
restlessness? Do I perceive restlessness in the space, or do I perceive it here somewhere? Is there
something I can tune into, some part of the space, that doesn’t feel restless? Tuning the mind in there,
perceiving the stillness instead of the restlessness. What effect does that have? Sometimes it’s almost as
if, inside, one is diving underneath the agitation and perceiving stillness inside.

Sometimes there’s tiredness in the experience. Tiredness is a very, very interesting thing. It can feel so
overwhelming. What happens if you try to locate that tiredness in the body? Sometimes, sometimes, all
it comes down to is a kind of vague pressure behind the eyes, and we’re reacting to that. What happens
if we just feel that, as it is, and just relax around it? Relax our relationship to the unpleasant pressure.
What happens then to the perception of tiredness? Sometimes, again, there’s pain in the body, there’s
constriction. This is a really interesting one. You can actually experiment and play with chopping it up,
like dicing a carrot or dicing some tofu. The mind makes things solid. What happens if we just chop it
up in our mind, this sense of just stuck energy in the back or constriction or pain? Just playing with the
mind and playing with the perception. Again, if we speak about tiredness again, sometimes one can just
perceive brightness there behind the eyes, perceive like a sun there.

Sometimes, when one really develops – I’m talking about, for most people, in the future – you can
actually even perceive pleasantness, you can choose to perceive pleasantness where there is
unpleasantness. You can develop that as a skill. It’s quite mind-boggling, really. Now, we might hear
this, and especially when one has had some degree of exposure to sort of Buddhist teachings and
insight meditation, and think, “That doesn’t sound right at all. That doesn’t sound Buddhist. That
doesn’t sound proper. That doesn’t sound like what insight meditation is supposed to be.” I’ll pick up
on this tonight. There’s actually a tremendous depth of insight here around the nature of perception. It’s
one of the particular ways that samatha meditation feeds that insight.
Finally, I want to say a little bit about this word “steadiness” again. How much can steadiness permeate
the day today? Might be sitting and one just gets a bit restless or fed up, and just decides to leave the
meditation hall in the middle of the sitting. Please don’t. Please try and see how much steadiness can
kind of permeate the being. We can just give a real container to the experience. If we follow what
restlessness says to do – restlessness says, “Get up and go out and have a cup of tea.” Restlessness says,
when one is walking, “Stop and have a cup of tea.” Restlessness says do this, restlessness says do that.
What we’re doing is feeding restlessness. Basically, the current, the river of restlessness, gathers power
in our being and in our lives. It becomes a torrent that is, in the end, impossible to stop. If we can just
be still and be in the container, “This is a sitting and I’m just going to sit,” then we’re not feeding
restlessness, and what we’re actually doing is feeding samadhi. Samadhi, part of what it means, is
steadiness – steadiness of attention, of being, of intention. If we can just be steady with our practice,
staying steady with the walking, staying steady with the sitting, we’re expressing steadiness. That’s an
expression of samadhi, and there’s a way it kind of feeds the samadhi. That steadiness percolates down
into the being. It percolates into the cells, slowly, slowly. We start feeding a steadiness, a restfulness of
being instead of a restlessness. It’s a gradual process. The question is, which do we want to feed and
which are we feeding? So not to force oneself to be steady or still, but it’s almost like relaxing into it,
allowing into it. The second aspect of the word “steady,” and I mentioned this when I first brought it
up, is a sort of larger picture of what it means to be steady. Just in the days here, have you noticed, “I
love Gaia House, I love being here, I love being on retreat, I love this practice. I love samatha, sign me
up for the next one.” And then a little time goes by and it’s, “I hate Gaia House...” [laughter] “I hate
this practice. I wish he would shut up.” [laughter] Who knows what this afternoon is going to be like?
This steadiness, it’s just stepping back and expecting the waves. It’s okay, it’s really okay. Not buying
into them so much. That quality, too, begins to percolate down into the being. It’s such a treasure, and
such a resource. Not easy, but to feed that, to nourish that.

9: 2008-08-12 Talk Five: Samatha, Nibbana, and the Emptiness of

Perception - The Relationship Between Concentration and Insight

Two evenings ago, I spoke, as part of the talk, about the inner critic. I’m quite aware, and you are, too,
that just because one devoted a quarter of a talk to it one evening doesn’t mean that it’s going to
disappear. So oftentimes that’s a structure that’s been around a long, long time. Decades, maybe. A
retreat like this can bring it up and sometimes certain talks can bring it up. We can find the inner critic
very alive, very well, very healthy, doing its job with impeccable aplomb, and it’s really there. I know
that, for some of you, with the talk last night, it brought it up. I know that for some of you just engaging
in this kind of practice brings it up. Perhaps some of what I say tonight, again, will meet that place, or it
will be around. Can that just be okay? Can it just be okay that it’s around? There it is, doing its thing,
doing its thing very well, and it’s just part of what’s going on. It’s just okay that it’s there. Perhaps
another part of the being is listening, and is perhaps hearing some truth in what’s being said. And it’s
just okay. It’s just okay that the inner critic is there. Some part is maybe listening and shelving pieces
for later. Some of what I say tonight is not in the realm of experience of actually anyone who is
listening, and that’s okay. I’m putting it out there partly because I want people who are interested to
know what’s available. I think that’s important. And partly because there’s a thread of one insight – one
insight that has a thread from the most mundane, everyday, obvious thing, all the way to final
liberation. I want to draw that thread out.

What I actually want to talk about tonight is the relationship of samatha and insight, the relationship of
concentration and insight. Now, usually, or for the most part, what we might hear about this
relationship is that – well, the most common thing that we hear about this relationship is that
concentration, samatha, calming the mind, is a kind of preparation for insight. So you spend some time,
a little time, or a lot of time, calming the mind, concentrating the mind, and then you take that mind
that’s more calm, that’s more clear because of that calmness and that concentration, and you start
applying it to insight meditation, applying it to trying to notice everything that’s going on in one’s life
and experience and understand that experience. The calmness and the clarity are what prepares and
enables the insight. That’s absolutely true, and it’s fine, no problem with that. But there’s actually
much, much more to it than that. This is what I want to go into. Not only is it a preparation, but one
finds that a mind of calm, a mind of some degree of samadhi, is like the best soil for the seeds of
insight to take root in. Some of you have been on retreat before, and you’re on retreat and you notice –
you have some insight about a personal difficulty, a personal pattern, a personality pattern, or a more
impersonal insight like impermanence of whatever. And it seems so clear: “Got it. I’ve got it now.” And
then the retreat ends, and one goes home, and sometimes it stays, but sometimes it just – “What
happened to that insight?” We seem to have lost access to it, or it has lost its power to actually feel like
it changes our life in any way. One of the incredibly important and potent things about samadhi practice
is that it nourishes the soil, in a way, so that seed of insight can really grow and take root really deeply
in the being, in a way that insights really begin to change the heart and the life of a person. And those
insights stay. They stay in a way that’s accessible.

Some of the relationship between concentration and insight I’ve already touched on, so I’ll just briefly
go through them again.
1) Confidence. We talked about that at some point, that slowly, slowly with samadhi, we get a sense of
confidence in ourselves, our capacity to be happy and feel well, and a confidence in our practice. That
comes slowly. That’s an indispensable part of insight: I know that I can be happy without whatever.
2) As I also said before, it gives us leverage to let go of what is perhaps not that helpful to be attached
to. There’s a real sense that we have some place from which we can kind of pry open or pry loose many
of our attachments. Really, really important.
3) Faith comes. I mentioned that last night. Slowly, slowly, faith comes – in the teachings, in the path –
that they really do lead where they’re supposed to lead. A juice comes into the practice, a sense of well-
being that’s incredibly nourishing for the journey.
4) Over time, with samadhi practice, the mind also loses its infatuation with what’s called “papanca,”
this kind of addiction to complicating everything and building huge difficulties and complications
around things. The mind just begins to be less and less interested and infatuated with that process.
5) More contentment comes into the life. All this is part of what I would call a larger aspect of insight –
insight being that which frees.
6) More able and willing to explore renunciation and the impacts that has, as I touched in the opening
talk, on climate change, et cetera, and all that.
7) There’s an easier understanding of all this Buddhist teaching about not-self, anatta, which can seem
so mysterious. That begins to become clear through the samatha practice itself. We begin to experience
times, moments, periods, where the self is very much in abeyance, very much less built-up and less
strong. This is something I’m going to come back to in this talk.
8) The mind also gets very malleable over time. We’re able to use the mind in a lot of different creative
ways, particularly in meditation. We talk about “insight meditation,” but it’s actually not one technique
– it’s a whole range of approaches. The mind just gets able to approach in different ways, and to
maneuver in different ways, to be used in different ways.
9) And, this I’ll also go into, slowly, slowly, as the samadhi deepens, we actually – something in the
being is more open to hearing about what the Buddha talked about when he talked about cessation, and
cessation of the world, or going beyond the world, which can sound so abstract and unappealing.
There’s something in there that we’re more able to hear that.
What I mostly want to explore tonight, though – that was sort of a lot of review. What I mostly want to
explore tonight is what we touched on this morning: the nature of perception. There’s something about
perception and samadhi which is really, really key, and understanding the way the mind, first of all,
builds problems. We build problems, and following that, even more thoroughly, more deeply, we
actually build everything. I’m going to go into this. There’s something about samadhi and
understanding this building process. When the Buddha was enlightened, he uttered a spontaneous poem
– I can’t remember exactly but he says, “House builder, you’ve been seen.” Some of you will
recognize, “House builder, you’ve been seen. Your ridgepole has been shattered. Your rafters
scattered,” or something. He’s seen completely through this building process, and that’s how he
described his awakening – I understand all this building that we human beings do. I understand it in a
way that I can actually put it down. So that’s this thread of insight that I was talking about. It goes from
the most obvious, mundane, all the way to awakening. It’s one thread.

So, we’re in our day, wherever we are. We find ourselves in a bad mood, or we are anywhere – here on
a meditation retreat, or anywhere – and there’s physical pain, arising from whatever cause. Or we’re
perceiving another person, someone we know or someone we don’t know, and we’re perceiving them
in a – “They’re a really terrible person. They’re really stupid. They’re really this or that.” We’re
perceiving them in a certain way. The Dharma question, “How am I compounding that perception?”,
ends up being one of the deepest Dharma questions. How am I compounding, first of all this suffering,
but secondly this perception? If I have a pain in the body, there’s a number of Dharma questions that
are really important. The first one is more basic, it’s “am I aware of it?” I’m in a bad mood, do I know
I’m in a bad mood? Or am I just kind of subjecting those around me to it and myself to it? Am I aware
of it? Can I be with it? That’s part of the first Dharma question. “Am I aware of it and can I open to it?”
But the second Dharma question, “How am I compounding it?” Or, better put, “How is the mind
compounding it? How is the mind building it and adding to it?” This question, pursued, takes one all
the way to complete awakening. That’s the question that needs to be answered.

So when we come to samatha – some of you are beginning to get an inkling of this already – we see
that in the samatha process what the mind is doing is not building, or it’s building less. It’s building less
problem. It’s building less, generally. People have pointed this out in groups – there’s something
authentic about that. When we build things up, there’s something a little inauthentic about that. I’m sort
of building up some view or perception of another person or perception of myself or perception of a
situation. It’s actually inauthentic. There’s something very authentic about not building, not engaging in
that process. You could say samatha is an act of not building, or the nonaction of building. We’re in a
relationship with a partner, friend, spouse, mother, child, whatever, and we blow up about something.
How often, afterwards – we get in such a tangle with the person, and in oneself in relation to what’s
going on – and then a little time goes by and afterwards you think, “Was that even really necessary,
what just happened between us? The way I got my nickers in a twist about all that? Was that even really
real?” Do you ever have that experience?

Some years ago, a work retreatant was describing a difficulty. I can’t actually remember what it was
precisely, but a difficulty. There was a lot of stuff, a lot of agitation around the difficulty. She would
also experience periods of calm. So I suggested to her at one time, “When there’s the calmness, when
there’s relative samatha there, how about dropping in some thoughts about the difficulty? Just
deliberately bringing up and dropping it in like little pebbles into this pond of calm, and seeing what
happens. And perhaps there can be some clarity from the calmness to seeing one’s way in this
difficulty.” But what happened was she came back and said, “When I thought about it, when I dropped
it in, nothing happened.” Nothing happened. Dropped the pebble in, hardly any ripples. Certainly no
big tsunami. What’s going on here? Is there something that’s not present in a state of samatha which
actually is needed to build a problem and build some agitation? Unless we go in and out of that
experience and see that over and over, it will just remain theory. We need to see it and feel it for
ourselves and go, “Okay, something is going on here.” People have reported in the groups that they’re
beginning to get a sense that the samatha is not a denial of our emotions. It’s not a turning away from or
running away from. Someone was saying, beginning to get a glimpse, “Oh, this emotional difficulty –
it’s that I’m just not feeding it somehow with my attention when I’m with the samatha.” It’s a different
understanding of what’s going on. It’s not clear at first. It takes time for this to reveal itself, to become
clear.

As the samatha deepens, as the samadhi deepens, I think I mentioned this, the sense of the self gets
weaker. The self – we take it so for granted, “This is my self, and this is who I am, this is my story.” As
one goes more and more into samadhi, we realize that whole structure of self just quietens. The house
gets smaller, less built up. We’re not building up the self and the self definition. The whole big story
and problem of the self is not being built up so much, as the samadhi deepens. That’s something that’s
actually happening as the samadhi deepens. Another thing that’s happening is that, you could say, the
world is not so built up. There’s a kind of fading of what we might call the world. “The world”
meaning the world of our experience, this – everything that we see, our emotions, inner and outer world
actually gets quieter. The self and the world begin to fade a little bit. That’s an inherent factor of
samadhi; it’s one way of describing what samadhi is, in fact. And then there’s a lot of insight in this, as
this happens, to whatever degree – even just a little bit, or a lot, or a tremendous amount, whatever.
Who am I when I’m not spinning the story? Who am I then? Who am I when I’m not thinking, when it
goes that deep? Who am I when even the body has dissolved? I tend to identify with this body, and this
story, and with my emotional content and my thoughts, but who am I when all that gets quiet, and then
it comes back, and then it gets quiet, and then it comes back, and it gets quiet? What’s real? Who is the
real me – the quiet one or the noisy one?

People have touched on this, too: even as the self gets a little bit quieter, and we jettison a little bit of
our story structure and the kind of things that define us, there can be fear there. We’re losing our
familiar bearings, our familiar scaffolding which holds our sense of identity and reality in place. There
can be fear there. I said at one point that it’s a kind of acquired taste. One really gets to feel comfortable
and reassured and safe and trusting in this fading. That’s gradual. One can go at the pace that one wants
and ease into it and really be okay with that. But fear is pretty common as part of that process. We need
to understand this – at a certain point there’s more to samadhi than the nice feeling and feeling a bit
calm, which is great and really nourishing and I’ve been emphasizing that, but we need to understand
something much deeper that has to do with insight. We need to understand this connection. Sometimes
the self is like this, big and noisy and “aaah,” a raging ogre of whatever. And sometimes the self is very,
very refined, and very quiet, or just normal, and sometimes it’s barely there at all – and also the world,
the world of our experience. We need to understand this, understand the building process of what the
Buddha calls “dependent origination.” That’s wrapped up with our experience and understanding of
samatha.

When the Buddha described the jhanas – I talked about the jhanas last night – he used a very, at first it’s
a very odd-sounding phrase, but he said, “These are perception attainments.” At first that sounds like,
“Why is he calling it that? Why doesn’t he call it capacities of consciousness or far-out states that you
can get into?” He’s very, again, very precise – perception attainments. This is what I want to really
explore in the talk. Going back to a little bit what I said last night with the jhanas, the first jhana – and
even this comfortable feeling we’re beginning to have, suffusing and spreading that comfortable feeling
in the body – the usual sense of the body that we have, the usual experience of the body, which is very
sharply defined, all begins to get a little more amorphous, a little more open, fluid, less defined. The
experience of the body comes to be this pleasant feeling. My perception of the body becomes a pleasant
feeling. As the jhanas deepen, my perception of the body becomes happiness. It’s almost as if the body
has become happiness, and then the body has become peacefulness, and the body has become stillness.
They’re increasingly refined perceptions of the body. Again, this actually takes quite a lot of doing it to
see what’s going on – it’s not an obvious way of looking at it at first. This is, again, one of the strokes
of genius of the Buddha; sometimes it’s just completely unbelievable, radically different insight.

Very briefly – the fourth jhana is actually not the end of the story. There are four more, I’ll very briefly
describe. Fourth jhana, nothing but stillness there. The body is kind of dissolved in the stillness. Very,
very refined sense of the body. That also can begin to get even more refined, until all that’s left is space.
There’s no perception of solidity anywhere – not here or out there. Even if one has one’s eyes open,
does it with eyes open, it’s like you’re not really perceiving any solidity or forms anywhere. It’s called
“the realm of infinite space.” That’s really all there is – one is kind of absorbed and dissolved in that
infinite space. Tremendous sense of freedom in it, and a very mystical sense of oneness. Just going to
go very briefly through these. That deepens again, and one passes beyond the space. All there is is an
infinitely pervading consciousness. So some of this is really on the edge of what we, without a lot of
meditation experience, what one might be able to imagine. There’s nothing but consciousness. Nothing
but conscious knowing. An incredibly beautiful, mystical experience. Even that deepens, the
consciousness fades, and there’s nothing but a sense of nothingness. One is just – it’s the realm of
nothingness. One is just totally struck and kind of dissolved in nothingness. That’s the seventh one.
Even that one – it goes beyond even that, and enters the realm of what’s called “neither perception nor
non-perception.” This is really on the edge of language. When there’s nothing, the mind is still
perceiving a sense of nothing. It’s very extremely refined, extremely subtle. There’s not even a sense of
perceiving movements of mind or any factors of mind or anything like that. Then one’s gone to the
edge of perception; it’s like the mind isn’t making anything or nothing at that point, but one still – it’s
almost just the most possible refined thing, and one is, in a way, struck by this inability of the mind to
determine if it’s a perception or not a perception. Incredibly refined.

Just briefly as well – in the fifth jhana, there’s a really mystical sense of oneness. There’s a kind of – all
the physicality in the universe is kind of one substance, one really sees that in one’s heart in a very deep
way. In the sixth jhana, infinite consciousness, it’s all one mind. So all this, all this stuff, is just the play
of one mind. That becomes a very real, almost palpable perception. These are, if one repeats them,
incredibly, deeply transforming, long-term.

Now, all samadhi, and all jhanas – whether it’s jhana or not, all samadhi is a kind of relief and release.
When there’s samadhi, we’ve actually been released from something. There’s a kind of relief at that
release. There’s a relief, even if one’s a little bit scared at first, one gets used to it, and there’s a relief at
letting go of the story. There’s a relief at letting go of the agitation. There’s a relief at letting go of the
hindrances. When one has completely let go of the hindrances, that’s also the first jhana, but the
Buddha also talked about them as stages of release and relief. That’s true of even non-jhanic samadhi.
There’s a spectrum here: relief and release, and with that, a sense of freedom. So again this isn’t
something one picks up on at first, but in a state of calm, even on this retreat when it feels calm, just
having a look sometimes – is there not also a little bit of a sense of freedom there? One’s actually been
freed from something, released from something. If we talk about the jhanas, in each state, something
fades from awareness. So the hindrances fade first, and in the second jhana thought fades. In the third
jhana, rapture fades. Before, even pre-jhanic, like I said, the story has begun to fade, emotional
agitation has begun to fade. There’s just a kind of gentle continuum of things fading. Once you’ve got
to the fifth jhana, the infinite space, what’s faded is materiality, solidity, form. And one keeps going
until, in the nothingness for instance, thingness – the thingness of things – has faded from experience.
One no longer is perceiving things. One no longer is in a world of things. That’s gone. Which is
wonderful. But there’s also insight there. Again, please see this all as a continuum. I am talking about
the jhanic level of things, but it’s also operating just at a level of more relative, everyday calm. There’s
insight here, and a kind of freedom that happens afterwards, with time, that comes from that insight.
One begins to see, on a retreat like this, or in one’s practice, hindrances. And then they go, and there’s
calmness. Then there’s hindrances, then there’s calmness. One learns, over time, somehow, they’re not
that believable. They’re not kind of, somehow, that real. One begins to get a sense, for instance, that
that negative emotion, that pain in the body, even, that doesn’t actually have to be there. One is moving
in and out of a negative agitation, say, or hindrance, or whatever, or physical pain. Moving in and out,
an insight begins to draw out that that doesn’t have to be there. It doesn’t have to be there. It’s not
actually a given. It’s not something that’s an independent reality. One begins to get a sense of how the
mind is fabricating it. The mind is fabricating emotional difficulty, hindrances, and even physical pain.
How it’s actually fabricating, as one goes deeper and deeper into this, solidity, thingness, et cetera. All
of that. One begins to get a sense that it’s actually fabricated. Is this making sense?

There are also, with samatha – and I’m not sure, you might have even noticed a little bit so far – but
certainly as one goes into the jhanas, et cetera, there are kind of after-images of jhanic states,
sometimes. Let’s take the peacefulness of the third jhana, or it could be just the calmness that one’s in
now. One goes into that state, and one emerges, and then one goes for a walk or a cup of tea or a
wander on the front lawn or whatever it is. Sometimes it seems as if that peacefulness is imbued in the
universe. It’s almost as if the actual reality of the universe is peacefulness. It washes over everything.
Everything speaks of peacefulness – I think I said that last night. One goes in and out of this, in and
out, in and out, in and out, and soon – or at some point – our notions of reality begin to get questioned.
How is the world? Is it peaceful or is it not? What is the reality here? Similarly, let’s say, taking it even
deeper, the space – one goes in and out of perceiving a sense of solidity and not perceiving a sense of
solidity so much that it undermines one’s given and unquestioned assumption in the solidity of things.
One has gone in and our so much that that perception begins to be undermined. In Dharma language we
say the perception is “empty.” It’s not a real thing. It’s empty. I perceive the solidity, and of course it’s
real on one level, but one begins to see what the mind is giving to experience. This takes time. It takes a
lot of doing samadhi and other practices and going in and out.

Please remember, it’s one thread of insight I’m talking about. I’m ping-ponging from different levels
and depths but I’m talking about one thread, from the everyday, most common, all the way to the
deepest. It takes time to absorb this. It takes time to realize its significance as well. At first it seems
like, “Okay, sure.” And I’m not sure even now as you’re listening, maybe you’re, “Yeah, I can kind of
see that, okay.” I really don’t know. But maybe. And it would certainly be possible that a person would
listen to this that way. It takes time to realize that this is of massive, massive, massive significance.
There was another work retreatant a while ago. She was doing some samatha practice as part of her
work retreat, and she was beginning to experience some well-being in the body, and being able to
spread that, et cetera. She sat a group weekend retreat, and she was sitting, and there was leg pain. She
got into some real knee pain or in her hip or something. They were doing a different kind of practice,
and suddenly in the middle of sitting she remembered what she’d been doing with the well-being and
spreading it. She just started to remember the well-being – just to remember it – and then the leg pain
went. What replaced it was a sense of well-being. She was enjoying that. But then she thought, “Am I
cheating?” “I’m not being with what is,” is what she came and told me. This notion of being with what
is, being with things as they are, is such a central one in the Dharma, but as I’m sure I’ve said already
on this retreat, there’s more to it than that. There’s much more than meets the eye here. So she could
have said, “Well, you know, things are impermanent.” That’s what we hear all the time, isn’t it? Things
change, so there was leg pain and then it changed, and then I had an insight into impermanence; I saw
that things change. But actually something else was going on, and it was of, I would say, a much deeper
potential insight than the insight into change. Sure, things change, and it’s important to see that. It’s a
very important level of insight meditation. But the more important insight is that our perceptions are
what the Buddha calls “dependent arisings.” What we perceive in the body, out there, in our minds, in
so-called reality – depends on our mind state. It depends on factors in the mind. That’s actually a
potentially extremely deep insight, and in a way a lot more significant than the insight into change,
which is still important of course. So any thing, external or internal, any pain even – physical, mental,
emotional, whatever it is – the Tibetans have a way of saying that emptiness means it doesn’t exist
from its own side. It takes the mind to kind of see it one way or another. It doesn’t exist from its own
side. It’s empty. The perception is empty. We talked about this, this work retreatant and myself, and she
was kind of like, “Woah. I don’t know if I’m ready for that.” And it was interesting, and I probably just
left it or whatever. She was here for quite a while. It was interesting just to notice how, over time, she
would forget that. I would prod her a little bit, or she would remember by herself, and she would forget
it again. She would forget its significance, and remember, and forget. Her initial reaction was, “I don’t
know if I’m ready to go near that kind of questioning of reality.” But even then it was like – this
forgetting, my point is that it actually takes time. It may sound like it’s just too weird or something. It
takes a lot of time to absorb this and to realize its significance.

So at first, samatha – concentration, calmness, and vipassana – insight meditation, seem like two
different things. I know for some of you who have done insight meditation before, you come on a
retreat like this and one thinks, “Wow, I’m really doing something different now.” As it goes deeper, we
begin to see that the samatha feeds the vipassana. The samatha feeds the insight, and the insight
actually feeds the calmness, feeds the concentration. They’re mutually reinforcing, and actually they
begin to blend into each other. They only seem different at first. One of the ways I particularly like to
sort of describe insight meditation is that what insight meditation is is developing ways of looking that
bring letting go, or developing ways of letting go, or developing ways of looking that bring freedom.
To me that’s what insight meditation is, more than a kind of “just being” with what is, although of
course that can be part of it.

This morning one of the things I dropped out there was, “Here’s some unpleasantness. Here’s some
pain in the body, some pain. What happens if I notice my reaction to it and I begin to work with just
relaxing that aversion?” When there’s unpleasantness, there’s going to be aversion. What happens when
I relax that aversion? One of the things that happens is the suffering begins to drain out of the
experience. But another thing that begins to happen is the mind calms down. Samatha comes. Another
thing that’s part of that samatha, wrapped up in that samatha, that can happen, is the unpleasantness
begins to fade. The actual unpleasantness begins to get less unpleasant. If I take as one of my insight
meditations or ways of looking – I’m just contemplating impermanence, I’m looking and seeing
change, over and over, change, change, change. I’m only interested in seeing change. That, too, should
and does lead to samatha. There’s a calming of the mind when one does that. There is a letting go, and
correspondingly, there’s a kind of quietening of what was difficult, a change in the perception. Another
possibility is – I’m running through these very quickly and just throwing out possibilities, but – another
one is regarding things as not me or mine. They’re not my self. So something comes up and – someone
was saying in an interview today, “Oh, it’s just that character again. It’s just that voice in my head. It’s
like seeing it’s not me, it’s not mine.” Well, you can do that with everything. You can do that with body
sensations, thoughts, mind states, moods, the whole spectrum of experience – it’s just “not me, not
mine,” it’s something that’s passing through or happening. Again, as one does that, there’s a calming
and a change in the perception of things. They actually begin to fade a little bit.
So if we think about what is it that builds experience, and particularly builds suffering, well, let’s go
back to a more – as I said, ping-ponging different levels now – let’s go back to a more mundane level.
How often do I rope my story in or start cycling my story, the story of my life and my future and my
past, in a way that’s actually compounding and building suffering? How often does that happen? Are
you familiar with doing that? Or identification. It’s like, when I – “This is a leg pain and it’s my leg
pain, and I bet no one else has leg pain here.” Somehow the self is identified with it, and that process of
identification builds. It builds the experience and it builds the suffering. Again, if I’m reacting to
something, if I’m aversive to what’s unpleasant, it’s building the experience and building the suffering.
And these kind of factors can be woven so subtly – in fact, they are woven so subtly – in our attention.
Sometimes we can feel, “I’m just being mindful of this pain. I’m just being with my emotion of grief.
I’m just being with my fear.” But there’s factors that are hidden, wrapped up in attention, that are
actually exacerbating, compounding, building the thing. One of the agendas of insight meditation is to
begin seeing what they are, and being able to let go of them.

I threw out another funny one this morning. I don’t know if anyone picked it up or not. This business of
dicing tofu and carrots. Did anyone try that? Okay. You may have found – I don’t know – you may
have found it actually had quite an impact. I don’t know. Of course, one could be coming out of
aversion, but the mind – one begins to see, if I dice it up in the mind, the solidity, the sense of this pain
being lodged in the shoulder or whatever it is, it can actually just free up and suddenly it’s not there or
it just dissolves a little bit. What’s happening? The mind is making something solid. The mind is
glomming something together; it’s gluing something together. That’s one way of defining what a mind
is – minds are what glom things together. That’s what minds do. The thing is, we don’t realize it. We
think the mind is here receiving experience. The mind is actually fabricating, this is the Buddha’s
words, 'fabricating' experience and 'concocting' experience – by glomming things together. [laughter]
I’m not sure why it’s funny, but anyway. It’s not an English word [glomming]? Gluing things together,
sticking things together, fabricating things, building things, sticking bits of plasticine. That’s what –
glomming is really a plasticine word. Do you have plasticine? Hard word. Okay. Sticking bits of
plasticine together, that’s what the mind does. We take what it then perceives as a reality. Inner or
outer, we take it as a reality. One can see, as one does that, dices things up, samadhi can come. And
again the perception changes. Or things I’ve thrown out, again, in the retreat – just staying with the
pleasant, staying with the pleasant, not getting pulled in with the attention to the unpleasant. Here’s
another one, can’t actually remember if I said it: you’ve got an area where it’s either unpleasant or
actually you’re not really sure what it is but something is going on there in the body. Something is
going on, and you’re kind of looking – someone actually shared this in a group, something is going on,
you’re looking at it. Is it pleasant or unpleasant? And in a way, one way of seeing that is that there’s
different frequencies going on at the same time. There’s a kind of pleasant frequency and an
unpleasant, and they’re kind of mixed. One can develop the skill, develop the art, of fine tuning the
radio tuner, and tuning in on the pleasant. What happens? This perception that was sitting on the fence
of pleasant or unpleasant actually goes into the pleasant. Or, sometimes, if you really develop this skill,
even when it’s unpleasant you can begin to see something as pleasant. There’s something about
attention and perception, that actually attention is building things. The mind attending to things is
actually gluing, glomming, things together.

If – just briefly – if one holds that reflection in one’s mind, over and over, and just keeps looking at
things, and kind of saying, “You’re glommed together. You’re glommed together. You don’t really –
you’re something that my mind is putting together.” Or, you could shorthand that and just say, “You’re
empty. You’re empty. You’re empty.” That’s an insight way of working. It’s a very deep insight way of
working. What happens is the mind ends up perceiving no thing, nothing. It ends up in the 7th jhana.
One could go further and say, “It’s just a perception.” Even the perception of nothingness is just a
perception. And one will, again, using an insight way of working, end up in neither perception nor non-
perception. Samatha feeds insight, and insight feeds samatha. They’re actually inextricably linked,
inextricably woven together.

So the Buddha has this word “Nibbana.” In Sanskrit, “Nirvana.” He said that’s the goal of the path,
that’s why we’re practicing – the end of suffering. One of his descriptions of Nibbana is
“sabbasankhara-samatha”, which the translation means “all fabricated things calmed.” The calming, the
quieting, of all fabricated things. In a way – again, it takes a lot of explaining, pointing at a direction
here that it takes a lot of samatha to actually begin to see this – there’s something that starts with just
coming back to the breath, letting go of the story, letting go. One’s actually fabricating less, in a process
that just – fabricating less, fabricating less – things get quieter and quieter, and as we go through the
jhanas, et cetera, things and the world and the self are getting quieter and quieter, all the way to the
neither perception nor non-perception, and then even more, to sabbasankhara-samatha, to Nibbana, to
what the Buddha calls the cessation of perception. He says that dimension should be known, where
vision stops, the perception of form fades, hearing stops. Everything of our six senses – internal mental
perceptions as well – fades, and one is not fabricating any perceptions anymore. He calls this Nibbana,
or the Deathless, the Unconditioned, the Unfabricated. And he says, “There, I declare, is no coming, no
going, no stopping, no passing away, and no arising. It is not established. It is without foundation. It
continues not; it doesn’t even exist in time. It has no object. It is without support. This indeed is the end
of suffering.” One has gone completely beyond the realm of what the conventional mind can know, to
the Unfabricated, or, you could say, the mind is not fabricating – and at that point it’s not even
fabricating itself, but mind is also something fabricated. Sometimes the Buddha described this as
“awareness without an object,” that awareness has gone beyond kind of seeing anything at all or
making any object at all, even an object of nothing or nothingness. The Buddha says this is complete
release, the awareness has been completely released from having to grasp on or hold onto objects.

Building turns out to be absolutely inherent, an inherent part of perception. It’s inherent in perception.
There’s something incredibly radical here. When the Buddha had his awakening, it was something so
radical, what he awoke to and what we can awaken to as human beings – there are, in a way, there are
worlds of experience, and one begins to see, “I can fabricate or I do fabricate worlds. I can fabricate a
nightmare world. I can involve my story and my pain and the way I see things and build that up. I
fabricate a world that is a nightmare. I can fabricate the everyday, conventional world that everyone
would agree on. And I can fabricate less and less.” In a way, the jhanas are still fabricated, but they’re
less fabricated. In a way, the jhanas and these realms of infinite space, et cetera, are fabricated worlds,
but they’re less fabricated. One can go beyond fabrication. One sees that even space and time, in the
sense of the past and the future and even the present moment – which gets so much weight in spiritual
teachings – even the present moment is something fabricated, the sense of a now, the present moment.
Things that we take so for granted, space and time – what more fundamental things can there be to our
experience? We begin to see that those, too, are fabricated.

So, yes, we enjoy our calmness and our sense of well-being, whatever that is and however that deepens.
But there’s something much more significant, and that’s that we need to understand, slowly, slowly, we
need to understand our deep meditation experiences. If we have an experience of well-being or bliss or
joy or oneness, there’s something that needs to be understood there. Otherwise we’re not milking it to
the full. It can be just an experience that the mind wants to get back, and we haven’t understood
something there. The mind might want to get it back and doesn’t know how to get it back, because it
hasn’t understood this process. So at first, the samatha, to whatever degree and including the jhana, at
first it seems like one is really fabricating a lot – one is flapping and really putting in the effort in
meditation, really huffing and puffing, and then you’ve got this calm and comfortable feeling, and
you’re holding it there and holding it there. It’s a lot of fabrication, a lot of work. And eventually it
moves to what I was talking about last night, where it’s actually – they’re just kind of there, these states
of calmness, deeper and deeper. And they’re kind of frequencies that exist all the time. That’s the sense
of them. And you can just tune in. Then in the middle sort of period they feel like they’re unfabricated;
they feel like you’re tuning in to different aspects of reality. And in the third sort of spiraling of that, or
the other level of the spiral as it comes back, is that then you actually understand how they’re
fabricated, even when they appear to be just tuning the dial; it’s a much more subtle and deep
understanding.

We can feel sometimes in meditation, “I’m just being. I’m not going to do anything. I don’t like doing
anything in meditation. I like just being.” And that’s a very valid and very beautiful way of practicing.
But it turns out, at a whole other deep level, to be a bit of a myth. Any moment of experience involves
some doing. It still could be a very useful kind of strategy at times, to just drop all the doing, and just
be. But it turns out that it’s a bit of a myth, or a lot of myth, actually. What it turns out is that the mind
produces experiences that it then consumes. It produces experiences that it then consumes, and
produces and consumes, and produces and consumes, and produces and consumes. It just does that
nonstop. It does that nonstop. And then the Buddha comes along and says, first of all, do you know
that’s going on? And second of all, is that really that nice? Is that really what we want to be doing –
producing and consuming? Or is there something actually a bit burdensome about always producing
and consuming experiences, even lovely experiences? What might happen if the mind stopped doing
that? What would that be? That takes a lot of skill, and that’s a whole spectrum that I’ve been talking
about. But when we talk about emptiness in the Dharma, emptiness is a very – there’s a lot of different
levels or depths to which one can understand that. But there’s something about the samatha, and kind of
going deep, and for some people who want to, going deep in this particular avenue, that actually
unfolds a very deep understanding of emptiness, a very deep understanding of this fabrication process.
And it’s an understanding that can really be lived. It’s really livable.

So sometimes, you know, we might read or hear about or read a text and it talks about this
Unfabricated, this Unconditioned, this passing beyond the world, this cessation of perception. And it
sounds horrific. It sounds like completely bleak. “Why would anyone want to get involved in that, for
heaven’s sake?” Something about the samatha, again, is that it’s progressive unfabricating. One sees,
“Oh, it’s nice not to fabricate a little bit. If I can fabricate a bit less, that’s even nicer. And that’s even
nicer, and that’s even nicer.” It kind of allows that movement towards what the Buddha’s calling
Nibbana or the Deathless. It allows that to be not horrific, not frightening for the mind. It’s okay at a
very, very deep level, that the world of our experience is actually empty. It’s really okay. The Buddha
said an arahant, a completely enlightened being – one of his definitions is “someone who has
understood perception.” Someone who has understood perception. It doesn’t sound that glamorous, or
sexy, but that’s how he put it sometimes. And understood the cessation of perception going beyond
time, beyond space, beyond the now, beyond a notion of awareness. So there’s something in all this that
has very, very deeply to do with truth, to do with fundamental notions of reality and what is true. What
is real? What is real? In the Dharma, the primary question is what is leading to suffering and what’s
not. But wrapped up with that question is “what is actually real?” What is really real? What is reality?
Am I suffering over something that’s not real? That’s what emptiness means; that’s the point of
emptiness, to realize that something I may be suffering over is not as real as it might seem. What is
real, and what is not fabricated? What is not concocted, not glommed together, not built? Is there even
something that’s not fabricated? For some people, for some people, these are going to be burning
questions; passionately alive, deep, driving questions in one’s life. They’re fundamental to our
existence as human beings. What is actually real?
Going back to that thing – is samatha escapism? Well, because of everything I’ve said, in a way, it’s the
opposite. It’s a journey towards what’s actually real, and more and more real, you could say – a letting
go, progressively, of what’s less real, or what’s more fabricated, more huffed and puffed and built up.
This understanding of the Buddha, it points to something totally radical. It’s totally radical. It turns our
notions of everything upside-down. The Dharma stands everything on its head. The Buddha says it’s
not that the world doesn’t exist, and it’s not that it exists. It’s what he calls the middle way. There’s
something very, very subtle to understand here about how things dependently arise, how they are
fabricated. In this understanding is freedom. It’s in that understanding that freedom comes. In a way,
you could say it’s one insight, from our most everyday – we just had an argument with our friend, with
our spouse, with our partner, with our boss – there’s an insight at that level, and a thread running all the
way to awakening, to Nibbana.

There’s a beautiful poem by Rumi, just to finish, called “Wean Yourself.” Is that an American word?
“Wean Yourself.” Beautiful, listen: “Little by little, wean yourself. This is the gist of what I have to say.
From an embryo whose nourishment comes in the blood, move to an infant drinking milk, to a child on
solid food, to a searcher after wisdom, to a hunter of more invisible game. Think how it is to have a
conversation with an embryo. You might say, ‘The world outside is vast and intricate. There are wheat
fields, and mountain passes, and orchards in bloom. At night, there are millions of galaxies, and in
sunlight the beauty of friends dancing at a wedding.’ You ask the embryo why he or she stays cooped
up in the dark with eyes closed.” Listen to the answer; this is the embryo talking. “There is no other
world. I only know what I’ve experienced. You must be hallucinating.” There’s something in the
samatha process, very deeply, that weans us. We wean ourselves off our attachments. We wean
ourselves off attachments progressively off the samatha itself. We pass beyond to a hunter of more
invisible game. In that is indescribable freedom that is available to us as human beings.