Transcription
Just my particular style of neurosis, preferred neurosis, but I really fret a lot about -- I want you all to have exactly what you need, exactly when you need it. [laughs] Each of you, rather. And of course that's completely impossible, so we'll just do the best we can. Today I'd like to divide things into two. First part is two pieces of instructions, and the second part, a talk about view, and effort, and attitude, and achievement. Two parts of instructions to start.
One is to give a little, slightly fuller (very brief still) instructions about if you're using mettā practice for the purpose of your base practice, for the purpose of moving deeper into samādhi and jhāna. Or karuṇā (compassion practice), or muditā, or something like that. The first thing actually to say here is that when you're doing mettā practice for the intention of jhāna, that's a different intention than doing mettā practice for the intention of cultivating mettā. It sounds obvious and not so consequential, but it's actually quite a big deal. So of course, when you use mettā as your base practice, as your springboard practice towards jhāna, and that's the intention, you're going to be cultivating mettā. Of course you are. How can you not be? Even if you're not -- if you're doing breath or some other practice towards jhāna -- jhānas actually have mettā in them. They are naturally filled, imbued, pervaded by mettā. I won't say any more about that. But if mettā is your practice, for example, is your base practice, then at some point -- there are two things -- at some point, it will probably fork. Is it the love that I'm primarily cultivating now, or is it the sense of well-being and pīti and happiness? Now, there are grey areas in the middle, and you can mix those two, but actually there's kind of a fork. And right from the beginning, or at some point fairly early on, you probably want to see, "What actually is my intention here?" Makes sense? The difference?
Yogi: [inaudible]
Rob: Well, if you're on this retreat, like I said on the opening evening, your intention is jhāna practice. That's your primary intention, which means that even just bearing that in the back of your mind is having all kinds of effects and kind of navigating your practice, without you even being conscious of it. It's a powerful thing. Intentions are extremely powerful things. Intentions create our worlds. And that's not hyperbole. So you want to be conscious about it. You want to be firm and clear what you're doing. And at a certain point, there might come -- for example, let's say you're practising mettā, there's love, there's this feeling, there are all kinds of shades of different feelings (which I'll talk about in a second). But really what you're looking for mostly is the pīti, is the well-being. I'll expand on that right now. That's mostly what I mean, partly what I mean.
And then, when that comes, and it comes up steadily and kind of often, then that becomes your primary thing. The mettā's just a springboard. I would say, at least the way I would teach mettā, and the way I tend to teach mettā, is that the qualities, the intentions of sensitivity, attunement, responsiveness, receptiveness -- these are all key. So why do I emphasize those in jhāna? I said: if we practise jhānas emphasizing those qualities and recognizing the importance of those qualities, look how important, how much overlap, and how much significance and relevance jhāna practice has for our emptiness practice, for our soulmaking practice, for our emotional practice. I forgot to say: for our brahmavihāra practice. Because the way I would teach mettā, actually, those are really key, central qualities. We're practising those.
There are different kinds of sensitivity, different kinds of responsiveness, but for example, with the mettā practice, if you're using phrases -- "May you be happy, may you be peaceful," whatever -- we talked about before, when we talked about pegs. Do I need more pegs here? Do I need to repeat that one first phrase a second time, for instance, maybe even a third time, before I even move on? I'm sensitive, I'm attuned, I'm responsive to the situation, and I'm responding to it by more pegs. Now sometimes, I don't need to. It's not necessary. That's the relatively gross level. I'm responsive to what I notice of my mind state, of my heart state.
[6:24] How 'loud,' so to speak, I say the phrases inside -- so you know, sometimes, again, the mind needs something really loud and clear: "May! You! Be! Happy!" And other times it's like a whisper. What does it need right now? Where's the volume? How sparse or dense the phrases are, meaning -- "May you be happy." And then I need to get another phrase in there right away, because if I don't put another phrase in, I'm going to space out. There's nothing to concentrate on. Once the mind is settled, and the heart is open, and there are all kinds of lovely heart frequencies there, "May you be happy," and I might just have some silence there, where I'm actually then resonating. The heart is really resonating in that silence, with the reverberations, the emotional frequencies and reverberations of that very phrase. So it might be, I don't know when I'll say the next phrase. But I'm sensitive, so the whole thing becomes a bit like, I don't know, riding thermals. It's like, "Oh, there's one. I can ride that. I don't have to flap my wings again right now." And then maybe that thermal -- I've lost it. If I want to go over there, I have to flap a bit. But I have to feel that thermal, and feel how it feels to ride it. All this is part of what I'm talking about: sensitivity, receptivity, attunement, responsiveness.
I want to be sensitive to the effects and the feelings in the energy body. Like we said yesterday, the whole energy body is really involved in the mettā practice. So when I say a particular phrase -- let's say, I'm on "May you be peaceful," or going through "May you be happy," and then just, okay, with the whole energy body. And then I hit "May you be peaceful" -- let's say that's the next one. And I notice, when I say, "May you be peaceful," I notice: "Ooh! That's got a certain flavour to it." Or that's just got more of an effect. I've caught a thermal with that very phrase. The phrase produces a thermal, so to speak, in the whole citta and body system. If I'm not sensitive here in the energy body and the heart, I won't notice that. I'm really opportunistic. So much meditation is about this attunement, receptivity, and then a kind of opportunism. What door is open here? What thermal is available? What can I ride? What has juice right now? And feel it. Then, also, each phrase -- not just "That one's more alive than this one right now, in this moment, so I'll stay with that one. I'll repeat it again. I'll ride that thermal. I'll do what I need to do to just keep riding that thermal," or surfing, or whatever your analogy is. Not only that, but each phrase, each word, even -- and that's another sensitivity: do I need to say this whole phrase, or can I just drop in the word 'happy'? This is all part of the responsiveness.
But the effect, as I attune more, and as I become more sensitive, and the energy body and the heart become more sensitive, "Oh, the word 'happy' has a different effect in the heart than the word 'peaceful'" -- sometimes. And it's not just that the word 'happy' has the same effect every time. So I'm sensitive to what exactly are the emotional tones and subtleties and frequencies that are arising. The whole thing is like this kind of attunement to different frequencies or colours or vibrations in the energy body, in the heart. And as you're sensitive to that and riding it, and appreciating it, and enjoying all those, all of those qualities -- though they might be different, the happiness and the peace -- I might then start radiating that out: "Here, you have some of this. You have some of this lovely happiness and peace." And the mettā is deepening, because mettā is actually not one emotion. It's a complex of emotions. I'm also, as I'm radiating out, bathing in it myself. I want to make sure I'm enjoying that. So I'm not losing it if I radiate it out to someone else.
If my intention, though, is for samādhi, then all that's going on, but as I said earlier, what I'm actually more interested in is when the pīti arises. Sometimes it's hard to distinguish. What's this? It gets all mixed up. Actually, we're interested in discrimination. I will qualify this, and this is one of those things where I'm going to contradict myself: some of us need to be really interested in discrimination. And some of us need to let go of discrimination for a while. But basically, we're interested in discrimination. But if my priority is towards jhāna, then I'm actually more interested in the pīti, this real pleasure feeling, well-being (I'll come back and talk about that in a sec), and that's what I want to allow to dominate, more than the mettā feelings. And that's what I'm riding. I mean, of course, it might be happiness, and you're going for the second jhāna. But that's it for mettā, for now. Is that enough to be going with?
The second thing I want to talk about -- and I wasn't going to talk about it today, but I just hear, and people I've spoken to, in notes and stuff -- I think saying a little bit now feels necessary, because for a lot of you, you will need something like this. And in a way, what I'm going to say now will make what I'm going to say a little later today -- make it make sense over a larger area. So what I want to talk about now is pīti, very, very briefly, and pick it up. I will say much more in the next few days.
What is pīti? The Pali word pīti: ecstasy, rapture, pleasant feeling, well-being -- technically, I would define it as 'pleasant physical sensations, or pleasant physical feelings, that arise from a non-sensual source.' In other words, it's not like a pleasant taste in the mouth or someone touching you in a nice way. So the pleasant sensation is arising from a non-sensual source. [13:29] I will talk more about it, as I said, but there are many manifestations. There's a big range in terms of how that can manifest, how intensely, what kind of experiences are involved, what kind of flavours. It can be a kind of tingling all through the body, as I said, a kind of rapture or an ecstasy, an almost electric-like vibration that's very pleasant. It could be just a sense of lightness. It can be a mixture of all these. There can be a kind of warmth with it. But the key thing is that it's pleasant. And the range of that pleasantness, both in terms of types of manifestation and also how pleasant it is, is quite extraordinary. I'll come back to all this. I'm just touching on this, just to put a few things in now that some of you will need.
So pīti was like Newton Abbot, remember? Or Newton Abbot was like pīti. It arises anyhow. It can arise anyhow, any which way. The important thing is for you to really learn how it arises for you. Is it going to be one way? Is it going to be many ways? Eventually it's just an intention. So it may arise from really just sticking the attention at the tip of the nose or the upper lip, and really keeping it there, and working with these other elements that we talked about yesterday, about the effort and the delicacy and the intensity, etc. It may well arise. It may erupt into the body at some point from basically the focus and the concentration, the intensity of energy.
It may arise from playing with the energy body, as we've done with the breath. And as we will touch on, you can also do it without the breath. So it arises, as I said, just from coaxing the energy body to be as nice, as comfortable, have as much well-being as possible. And slowly, slowly, that just shapes and kind of warms up into more and more pīti.
It might arise from an insight way of looking. Someone was saying yesterday -- it's quite common for some people -- it may arise for some people with the nāda sound (I'm not even going to explain that meditation; if you don't know what it is, it doesn't matter). It may arise just from open-heartedness. So again, how often do we think of all this business as arising from something called 'concentration,' which means an intense focus and keeping my mind on something? People say to me -- so common: standing outside, looking at a tree, appreciating, opening myself to the beauty of something in nature, and pīti arose right there. Wasn't really concentrating on the tree: "Let me look at the bark." Then you think, "Oh, but isn't that sense contact? The tree is sense contact." Actually, the nose, nostrils, the sensations are sense contact. It's not the pleasantness of that sense contact of the tree: "What a perfectly formed tree!" It's not the pleasantness of the sensations that there might be here. What's happening is there's an openness of being. And that, I would say, is more primary than anything else for the arising of pīti: openness of being. The person's just there in nature or something else. The heart is open, the being is open, and actually the energy body is open, and pīti arises naturally. In fact, with that openness of being, pīti is just something that's there. It's then something you can just tune into.
So it can arise any way like that. Once it arises, then we have, I could say, 'work' to do. I know some people don't like the word 'work,' so I could say, then we have 'play' to do. Or you might not like that word; some people don't like that. So either one -- if you don't like either, then we have 'doing' to do. [laughter] And I know some people don't like 'doing' in meditation. [laughter] And then, if you're one of them, I think you're really on the wrong retreat, and there might be some conceptual issues that need some inquiry.
I'll say just a tiny bit now about what this work/play is, or needs. I'm going to say more later on. I just want to give you just a little bit. Now again, you're all in different places. The primary thing right now is: where's my playground? Some of you, your playground might be -- whatever it is, the fourth jhāna. Some of you are still working with the energy body. Some of you are still working with the concentration. It doesn't matter. But I really want to emphasize: can you discern where your playground [is]? What did we call it? Your playground at your edge. This is the way we're teaching jhāna on this retreat, and there's a reason for it. And I'm not going to -- I don't have time to repeat everything we've said so far.
Where's your playground? Can you identify that and spend most of your time there? And actually marinate. Really spend a lot of time in whatever -- let's say it's second jhāna. Whatever. Really, it means spend time there -- hours, hours, again and again and again, as much as you can. And can you develop this mastery, and what's involved in mastery? The shorthand is, why? Because, I would say, that's how we're going to get the most fruit out of all this, more than any other way. (That's just my opinion. I've been through all this.)
So what is this work and play? What does it involve? I just want to say, for now, just a snatch of it. Let's just say, for now, three play/work thingies to do.
(1) One is to see if you can spread that pīti or well-being. As the Buddha said when I read through his descriptions, can the whole body be suffused, saturated, drenched, steeped with this -- if it's the second jhāna, it's happiness; if it's the third jhāna, it's a kind of beautiful peacefulness; if it's the first jhāna, it's pīti. So if pīti comes up, and it sustains for more than a few minutes (if it doesn't sustain that long, it's not quite ready to work with yet, but if it does), then one of the things to see if it can happen -- can it just spread, so that the whole body space is contained in the pīti? It's in the pīti. It's touched by the pīti, pervaded, etc. I'm going to say, for now, it's okay if it doesn't. It's okay if that doesn't happen. Okay? I will add and revise all this as we go on. I just want to say a little bit, like I said, right now. So the first thing is, see if it can spread. See if you can get your whole body involved, touched, enjoying, in it.
(2) The second and third things are two modes, what I call 'modes of attention.' So here's the pīti. Let's say it comes up, and it has spread. And then I say, "Where is it strongest?" Maybe it's strongest, let's say, around my throat. I might not even have a clear sense or image of my throat at that point, but it's sort of in that region. I can kind of get that. I may have a sense of my throat, I might not, but somewhere around there.
(2.1) So mode number one is like an arrow goes into a bull's-eye. Right in the centre of where it's nicest, I want to probe it with my attention, with a narrow focus. I really want to penetrate it, get inside it, dive into it. Very spatially one-pointed. But as I'm doing that, my primary intention -- yes, I'm concentrating on it; yes, I'm focusing on it, but I want to relish it. I want to maximize my enjoyment, moment after moment. Where's the enjoyment here? Am I letting myself enjoy it? Can I enjoy it? Like nuzzling into it: "Ohh, yeah!" Or putting your tongue in a little cup of honey, and just wanting to lick every little last bit of honey out of it. I'm not kidding, okay? [laughter] Don't underestimate how much we prevent ourselves from enjoying, at all kinds of levels, and through all kinds of indoctrination, psychologically, etc. Concentrate, yes, probe, and really enjoy. Enjoy again and again and again. Find the enjoyment there.
(2.2) The second mode of attention is a complementary one -- complementary in the sense, rather than being narrow and probing, it's open and receptive. So it's more like, "Ohhhh, yeahhhh," just like you're sunbathing, and your body is just soaking up the sun. And you're opening -- you're opening yourself, you're abandoning yourself. Or like you're in a really perfect temperature shower, with a perfect water flow, and just "Yeahhh ..." So opening, receiving, surrendering, etc. Abandoning is even not too strong a word. Abandon yourself to it. Surrender. Open your body to it. Open your being to it, again, with the intention and the sort of -- I don't know what the word is -- 'nudge' or 'emphasis' to enjoy it to the max. How can I really drink the most enjoyment from this? So there are two modes of attention, and we can kind of alternate in a very relaxed, sort of improvised way between this more probing/narrow, and the open, surrendered, sunbathing thing.
There's no formula. Just move back and forth. The very moving back and forth is a bit like the bathman with the soap. Remember in the Buddha's analogy? You're working something. Part of how it works is through this going back and forth with the attention like that. So not really fast, not all nervous, and don't worry about, "Oh, is now the right moment?" It's hard to tell in advance. It's like, "If I move now, is that going to help?" Just be relaxed, and just play and move. In time, sometimes you do get a sense of these things, but the movement itself is shaping something. It's forming something. It's allowing something to coalesce and to build.
So spreading it or seeing if it will spread, and then these two modes of attention -- that makes three. You could do the 'see if it will spread' first. I'm not going to talk much about that now, other than to say, it's fine if it doesn't. Just see if it will spread. Imagine it will spread. If it doesn't, no big deal. But I'll come back to that. Let's say, for now, it's okay if it doesn't. Because if it doesn't -- let's say the pīti is just around here, and it feels like, "Well, actually, my legs just feel normal." Fine. You can still do the probing and the sunbathing with it in a smaller area -- no problem. So you alternate. Or you could do the alternating, and then see if it spreads. It doesn't really matter.
Did that make enough sense? I just wanted to throw it out because I think it will probably be relevant for some of you right now. Okay, so that's the end of part one.
