Transcription
I want to start today with what's really the last chunk about base or springboard practices, so two pieces around base or springboard practices. And then, you're certainly welcome to ask more and bring it to interviews, but this will be the last bit about that from me at the front, so to speak. As I said, two parts to it:
(1) The first part has to do with insight ways of looking, and in a way, I mentioned it right at the beginning in the opening talk, and Marco also in his question yesterday mentioned that. So what do I mean? I'm going to be very brief here because this won't be really relevant for many of you.
Insight ways of looking: what does that mean? Usually, or perhaps a very common way of thinking about insight, or insight practice, insight meditation, is one is basically mindful, paying attention, and paying attention as carefully as one can, and as continuously as one can. And in that careful and continuous mindfulness, attention, watching one's experience, etc., at some point one realizes something. One has an insight. One gets something. That's one way of understanding what insight meditation is, but also what insight is. That's great.
There's a second way -- which is perhaps less common, but that I tend to emphasize quite a lot -- which is more taking an insight and using it as a lens, looking in certain ways: a way of looking. For example, if one realizes that body sensations are not-self, one has maybe had that experience (or maybe one hasn't had that experience), one takes that understanding, and then one starts looking at experience, at body sensations, and seeing them deliberately, over and over again, as not-self: "They're just happening. They're not me. They're not mine." So it's more active. It's more deliberate. I'm not 'being mindful, waiting for an insight to come.' I'm looking at something in a certain way.
There are lots of these possibilities. What's key about them is that what I would call an 'insight way of looking' brings letting go. And it brings letting go now, in this moment. In other words, here's this pain in my back, my knee, whatever it is. When I look at it with an insight way of looking, it's not just, "Oh, that's interesting. It's not-self." It makes a difference to the experience. The suffering begins to lessen or dissolve. The actual experience itself (of the pain or whatever it is) begins to change.
What defines an insight way of looking, then, is that there is letting go. It brings letting go in the moment. Another way of saying 'letting go' is it 'releases clinging' in the moment. So this painful sensation -- there's clinging in the sense of aversion: I want to get rid of it. There's also clinging in the sense of "It's me or mine." I'm assuming, unconsciously, without even thinking it. And the insight mode of looking, the insight way of looking, dissolves those, right in the moment. It lessens clinging. It attenuates clinging. So there's letting go and attenuation of clinging: two ways of saying the same thing.
Now, we could say that when we cling, as human beings, our energy body contracts. How do we know we're clinging to something? One of the ways is, you can feel it in the energy body. There's some kind of contraction somewhere or other in the space of the energy body. When we look with an insight way of looking which organically, by definition, has in it the capacity and the mode of letting go of clinging, then one of the things that happens, therefore, is that the energy body undoes -- there's an undoing of a certain amount of contraction in the energy body. That's what happens. That's one of the things that happen when we look with an insight way of looking -- sustainedly, deliberately.
What also happens with an insight way of looking -- as I said, the phenomenon itself begins to change. As I get skilful in a certain insight way of looking, the phenomenon that I'm looking at with this insight way of looking begins to fade. Here's this pain; it's very intense. I keep looking at it. To just follow the example, I keep looking at it as 'not-self, not me, not mine, just happening.' And as I slowly do that, the pain, the unpleasantness starts to get less unpleasant, and even less unpleasant until it becomes neutral sensation. If I keep looking at it that way, in the insight way of looking, actually the sensation begins to fade. There's no sensation there any more. There's a space there, for example. Maybe it even goes via some pleasant sensation -- in other words, what was unpleasant turns pleasant, then maybe turns neutral, or the other way around. But eventually, there will just be a space. There will be the fading of that perception, the fading of that phenomenon, the fading of that experience, appearance, phenomenon, perception. We say it's 'less fabricated' because what's central to an insight way of looking is that it fabricates less: less dukkha, less self, less object.
Whether we look at it like we're undoing contractions in the energy body, or whether we say we're fabricating less solidity in the body, in the perception of the body -- an insight way of looking does either of those; they're the same thing, whichever way we're looking at it -- and pīti will arise. Pīti will arise as a less fabricated perception, or other jhānas. So an insight way of looking can open up the jhānic sense. Does this make sense? I realize that was a very brief explanation. Going back to what I said in the opening talk, what I mean by 'insight ways of looking' is insight practices, and (sorry for this, it sounds very -- there's probably a word for it, but) I mean insight practices as I describe them, for instance, in my book Seeing That Frees.[1] So you might have done lots of insight retreats or whatever. You might have had insights into impermanence, whatever. I really mean something quite specific. If you're not familiar with all that, just leave all this. It's just an option that you can leave for another time.
If you are familiar with it, though, what you can do is take that -- take one of those practices that you feel familiar with, one of these insight ways of looking, and start using it. Start using it, and use it sustainedly -- just as sustainedly as you would use the concentration on the breath or whatever. And what you will notice is, as you engage this insight way of practice, the energy body starts to feel good, for the reasons that I've just said. Either you can conceive it as: "It's getting its knots unknotted. It's getting uncontracted," or more accurately and sophisticatedly conceived, it's: "The whole bodily perception is being fabricated less." As you keep practising the insight way of looking, the body starts to feel good. The energy body starts to feel good. It has some kind or some flavour of well-being there. And as the Buddha said, you don't snatch at that. So you're doing your insight way of looking, doing your insight way of looking, in touch with the energy body, noticing how it feels, and then at a certain point you say, "Yeah, it's nice now." Then you don't just snatch at that nice feeling, the pīti, or could be a different flavour of nice feeling. But you keep doing your insight way of looking, letting the nice feeling build, noticing it as well. Maybe then your attention is balanced between keeping doing the insight way of looking and the nice feeling. And at a certain point, just gently, you can manoeuvre your emphasis and attention so that the primary thing you're into, and the primary thing you're doing, is enjoying the well-being in the energy body, enjoying the pīti.
So you may keep with the way of looking for a bit, but then at some point, if you're switching to samādhi practice -- again, samādhi is about the intention. That's what differentiates practice: it's the background intention. The samādhi intention has: "I really want to get into this enjoyment. I really just want to absorb and bathe and enjoy to the max." That's a samādhi intention. So at some point, what really swivels is your intention there. And to focus on it, and to maximize the enjoyment, getting really intimate with it, playing with those two modes of attention that we talked about yesterday, spreading it as well.
These kinds of practices are immensely powerful. So they may take you well beyond pīti, in fact, and well beyond the first jhāna. They may take you into different formless jhānas, the last four jhānas. Where they take you is partly dependent on which insight way of looking you're practising. It's partly dependent on your previous experience. If there are certain realms that you've visited a lot, you've kind of got a groove in the mind, and it might tend there. But it's partly dependent on which insight way of looking.
Again, what is your playground? What is your learning edge playground? If your learning edge playground is the first [jhāna], and you play with an insight way of looking, and it takes you into the fifth or sixth jhāna -- okay, that's maybe not what we want at this point, because you've decided that the first jhāna or the third jhāna, or whatever it is, is your playground, and that's shooting you way beyond it. But it might be that as you do the insight way of looking, as things fade, you can kind of pick up on the point where actually, it's just well-being now; it hasn't overshot it into this huge empty space, or whatever it is.
Okay, so that's one other possibility for a springboard or base practice: insight ways of looking. It's probably quite rare as a way of doing samādhi, but so what? It might be your main thing. There's a second way I want to come back to, using it not so much as a main practice, and I'll come back to that a little later today.
(2) All right, second possibility or group of possibilities I want to talk about today is a little bit more with the energy body. Again, related to Sabra's question, the energy body -- I would just view [it] as a whole collection of possibilities. I mean, I'm just throwing out a bunch of possibilities, but I count it as one sort of base practice. But what I emphasize today is -- so far, mostly we've done the energy body with the breath, the breath as something that kind of stimulates, opens, energizes, massages, shapes the energy body. What I want to do today a little bit is practise energy body without the breath, because that's also a possibility. So we could make that a separate category. You could just lump it into one. In a way, it's neither here nor there.
I'll you what: let's play a game, a meditative game. Then I'll review at the end, and you can write notes. But let's just take a few minutes to just play a little bit.
[14:07, game #1 begins]
Taking that time is so worth it, to just take a little time to settle into the posture. And that posture has openness in it. You need to be able to feel the openness in the posture. What do you need to do? It might be a micro-change in the posture. What do you need to do to actually feel it as open, and to feel it as receptive, and to feel it as soft?
And at the same time, the posture expresses, manifests the citta qualities, the heart qualities, the mind qualities of uprightness, wakefulness, alertness, resolve, energization. So there's this complement there. Find a posture that expresses -- can't remember what the the Latin is -- this amalgam of opposites, coincidentia oppositorum. Find that. Settle into the posture, which really means not just settle down, but open out. Open out the awareness. Settle out into the posture. Fill out the posture with that awareness. Fill it out.
And then, opening the awareness to the space of the whole body, the whole body space; opening to the sense of the energy body, the feel of the energy body right now. Doesn't matter what your breath is doing. Just opening, opening to that whole space. Keep opening it. You're just there, alive with the presence that's sensitive to the vibration, the texture, the feel, the energy, the tone, the tones of that whole space. Keep opening. It's not that you open further and further; it's that you open again and again, just a little bit bigger than the physical body.
And that whole space, the whole energy body, filled with bright awareness, bright presence, bright sensitivity. See if you can turn up the brightness right now, the brightness of your attention. How does it feel? How does that whole space feel right now?
Sometimes, as we just open to that whole space, we begin to notice, actually, it's already a little bit pleasant. Maybe it's a lot pleasant, or maybe it's just a little bit pleasant. There's some well-being, somewhere, or lightly pervading the whole space. So if that's the case, notice it. Enjoy it. Open to it. Without snatching just at that, let it fill the space if it can. We're just opening up the awareness to that space of the energy body, again and again, and tuning to any sense of well-being or pleasantness that's there, and opening yourself to it. Opening your body to it. Feeling it.
[19:15, game #1 ends]
Okay. That was game #1. No problem if there wasn't pleasantness there. Sometimes there might be. If there isn't, and you're working with the energy body, it's just a matter of staying with it, noticing what is there, maybe introducing some breathing or the mettā or whatever it is.
[19:39, game #2 begins]
Okay, game #2 has four little parts to it. Same thing: whole-body awareness, stretch it out again. Get so used to opening it up again and again. You're going to do that a gazillion times in your life, again and again, open. Let that bright presence fill the whole space.
And within that whole space, while you're still aware of the feeling, the tone of the whole space, let two points in particular become, if you like, more prominent, or you're more kind of focusing on them, with the whole space as well. So one point, let's say, somewhere in the middle of your head, or the area where your head used to be, and another point, let's say, somewhere either down in the middle of the body around the solar plexus, or even a little lower, just below the belly button, somewhere around there. And you've just got these two points. And simultaneously, you're kind of prioritizing a focus on both of them, with the whole body. What does that do, this bi-focus, this double focus with the background attention to the whole body?
What does it do if you imagine a line of energy or a line of light -- say, white, golden light -- between those two points? With the whole-body awareness included, but that becomes prominent, this line of energy connecting these two points. How does that feel?
Okay, let that go. Find again, stretching out the awareness again and again, fill that whole space with presence, with sensitivity. How about imagining three lines of energy? So these three lines meet somewhere in the lower belly, right in the middle, or that kind of area. Really doesn't matter if your anatomy is not at all clear to you right now. It's fine if it is, fine if it isn't. Three lines of golden, white light energy, or just a kinaesthetic imagination of energy: one of them goes from that point in the lower belly, around there, right up the centre of the body and out through the top of the head. Right out through the top of the head. And the other two go down. One goes down each leg and either out your knees or out your feet. The important thing is the kinaesthetic imagination. It's fine if it helps to be visual as well. But really, what does it feel like to imagine lines of energy constituting, constellating the body, the body shaped around these lines of energy? How does that feel? What do you notice? Open the whole space. Open the awareness to the whole space. And within that, these three lines of energy.
Okay, you can let that go. And again, opening up the awareness, stretching it over the whole body space, inhabiting, really filling that whole body space with this bright presence, bright awareness, bright attention. And now, two lines -- imagine two lines. Again, one down the vertical centre of the body, and another, perpendicular to it, at right angles, ninety degrees across it -- across, say, perhaps the level a little lower than the shoulders, like where the nipples are, roughly. It really doesn't have to be exact. It's not about that. Nor is it about seeing clearly what these lines of energy look like. It's just a way of shaping the energy. Just a light imagination -- two lines there.
Now you tell me -- or rather, don't tell me, but just see, what feels better? If these lines of energy go out of the body? Out, let's say, through the bottom, through the perineum, and out through the top of the head, and out through the sides? Or if they stay within the body? Bright, white, golden lines of energy, but more important, the kinaesthetic sense, the kinaesthetic imagination. Whole-body awareness. What do you notice?
Okey-doke. Last one of this. Let that go. Again, whole body spreaded, and imagine your energy body -- your whole body, in other words, that whole space -- your energy body is a golden, white cloud. A cloud of golden, white light. So its edges are not particularly defined. It's more cloud-like. It's filled with this bright, bright luminous light, golden white. Again, stretch out the awareness. How does that feel? What do you notice?
Okay, you can let that go.
[27:27, game #2 ends, game #3 begins]
The third little game or exercise is, again, whole body, whole space. And if I say to you, imagine your body, imagine your whole body as radiant and empty -- empty in the Dharma sense, whatever that means to you. In other words, whatever level of understanding you have of emptiness, or what that means to you, just plug that in. Imagine your body, your whole body as radiant and empty. Whole-body awareness, the whole space. Your body: radiant and empty, luminous but empty, whatever that word means to you, Dharmically.
Okay. You can let that one go. Last one, just for fun. Same thing: whole-body awareness, whole body space, whole energy body, filling out that space. This time we actually want to keep some sense of the shape of your body, of your anatomy. So in this game, you really want to stay sensitive to how that whole body space feels, like where you're sitting right now. But if I add this: can you (or I invite you [to]) just imagine an energy body coloured blue, a lovely blue, in the shape of your body, that flies out from your body. Flying. It can fly. You remain sensitive to everything you're feeling in that space, but imagine this lovely light, luminous blue energy body, flying out. Maybe it does these very free flying manoeuvres somewhere in front of your body. How does that feel in the energy body space? Maybe it does loop-the-loops. What does it want to do? How does it feel? You have to really stay connected with the feeling in your space, your energy body space.
Okay. When you're ready, connected to your energy body space, you can open your eyes.
[31:37, game #3 ends]
So, what have we got here in this little group? We've got just a few little games, but really, essentially, what we're doing is going to the energy body experience, and sometimes, without doing anything with the breath or mettā or anything else, we notice there's already some pleasantness there. And it might already be enough pleasantness to work with, enough to kind of coax and gather into pīti and well-being and focus on it. Don't need anything. But it also might be, we just play a little bit with the imagination, and that starts to shape and fabricate the experience in certain ways. If it is already pleasant, etc., then like I said, maybe you can get into that.
Shall I run through what we did? Would that be useful? Yeah?
(1) So the first one is: just open to the energy body. Forget about your breath. Forget about the mettā. Just open to the energy body, the whole space. See how it feels without putting any pressure on it. There might be more there already than you commonly realize. That's the first one.
(2) The second one is: you're just really playing, again, with your imagination. It's primarily a kinaesthetic imagination. If the visuals help it, great, but primarily it's kinaesthetic. In other words, the inner tactile sense, inner energetic sense of either -- well, let's backtrack now. Sorry. What I actually started with was giving two points, two spatially separate points within the energy body; it's almost like your mind is paying attention to two things at once, predominantly and equally. Rather than just one point, paying attention to two points. And sometimes, there's something that does: it just opens things up. And it can also allow things to become more stable, because again, there's more of a base, a wider base. So we did that as well.
(3) Then there's also the possibility of, as I said, using the kinaesthetic imagination, which may be helped by the visual imagination, and imagining certain lines of energy. And really, you can just play with whatever. So it might be a vertical line. It might be this vertical line, with lines going down the legs. It might be other lines intersecting in different ways. It might just be this kind of slightly amorphous, luminous cloud of energy. But the imagination shapes the energy. And then that becomes an experience, and it's no longer imagination. I'm actually experiencing these things. And for samādhi, that can become useful.
(4) And then the other two were really just, they're probably less common, but you know, you can imagine your body as radiant and empty, I said, even if you're not quite sure what 'empty' means, or you're kind of using it as fairly fundamental. And I don't know. When you tried that, did anyone ...? Was that ...? Interesting, isn't it? Is that a question, Andrew?
Yogi: No, it was...
Rob: It was what?
Yogi: Amazing.
Rob: Yeah, so partly this is the point. It's like, look. All this stuff is not necessarily so far away. You just do this little game for -- what were you doing, thirty seconds or something? And stuff starts to happen. And how much the whole thing is conditioned, the whole thing is fabricated. The experience of the body is fabricated by the mind, and that's fabricated by what I put in the mind, what ideas, or what views, or what ways of looking, or what imagination, etc. -- and even when I don't quite know exactly what I'm talking about or thinking or what it means! There's a magic in all this. There can be.
(5) And how about the flying one? Was that ...? [laughs] Yeah? Some people like that. Okay, good. You know, it's not to say you're always -- there is a whole other thing which we really don't want to get into on this retreat. It's whole other thing. But this is just -- these are little just stimuli, trigger practices, yeah? That's how I'm using this. To just get a sense of how sensitive a system the energy body is. And by 'energy body,' I mean the experience of the energy. It's so sensitive, it's so conditioned and fabricated by the littlest thing, by the smallest thing, by the subtlest thing.
Okay, so basically what I'm saying is, you can either go to the energy body directly, and it might already be ready to work with, or you can play with the energy body in ways that don't really include mettā or breath. But mettā or breath, of course, will also shape the energy body, yeah?
Okay. I've never taught a group jhāna retreat before. All the jhāna retreat teaching I did was one-to-one. And in a one-to-one interview, you know, the person comes in, and they report an experience, and out of everything from my experience and my teaching that I know about jhānas, I just will select exactly what I feel they need right now, to frame what just happened to them, and give them the next thing to work on. And they take that away, and usually I see them either three days later or a week later, or whatever it is. And then again, they come in with something, and I'll give them a piece. And in that way they don't get overwhelmed at all in terms of information overload, etc. When it comes to teaching a group retreat, I have to think differently, and I do, actually. Almost every group -- nah, a little different for some retreats, but in these kinds of retreats, I think very differently.
So I don't know. I remember being very young and being invited to birthday parties in the neighbourhood of the kids my age. This must have been a very alien sort of ritual to both of my parents, but for me it just became a thing. You know, there would be a birthday cake with the candles and all that, and you'd have a slice of birthday cake. And then when you went home -- I don't know, do they have this in the States? -- and you get a going home present, which is usually another piece of cake. [laughter] Is this familiar to anyone? Yeah? So I think of this as like, there's a big slab of birthday cake that's a going home present for you. And so I'm inviting you to think of it that way if you feel like, "Ehhhhh, this is way too much!" I'm sitting here. This is how I have to think of it, for me. I'm sitting here, and I'm teaching to you now. I'm giving you something that I hope will be useful for you now. And certainly in interviews, that's exactly what I'm doing. It's a one-to-one interview.
But I'm also speaking to another 'you' -- the 'you' that's alive and still wants to practise in a year's time. And another 'you': the 'you' that's still alive and wants to practise jhānas in five years' time or ten years' time. So I'm actually speaking to multiple 'yous.' And between you, you can eat all that birthday cake. [laughter] Without getting indigestion.
I'm also -- and for me, this is actually really important -- I'm speaking to people who are not in this room. All this is -- if Nathan is doing his job right, all this is being recorded. [laughter] And I've been very conscious of that for years. So I feel like I'm speaking to people I will probably never meet. I'll never know them. I'll never even know that they listened. They may be somewhere -- for all kinds of reasons, they're not able to come. It's not even just a matter of timing. Maybe they can't afford to come on retreat. Maybe they have a health situation, that they can't do something like that. Maybe they have family obligations or work -- whatever it is. So most of the group retreats I teach, I'm actually thinking of other people that neither you nor I -- or maybe you might meet some of them. I might meet a few of them. But there are people that we will never meet, and they matter to me a lot -- not more than you, of course, but they matter to me a lot, especially the people who would not be able to come, and who are out there, really, nowadays, with the Dharma and the internet, really in the middle of nowhere, and they have very little Saṅgha, and they have very little direct teacher access. And they can listen to the stuff on the web, you know?
So I'm also, in a way, speaking to you, your future selves, and these people. Maybe when you have more time, when you can take more time with this material; when, actually, a little later on, however later on, actually, things will make more sense, some things will make more sense; when you will actually be able to realize (because of what's come in between, partly -- "Oh, I've understood emptiness more," or something else, or you've done other practices, or something in your conception has opened, or your practice has deepened), when, actually, you'll be able to realize more of the significance of some of the things that are being taught now. You'll also maybe realize how it fits together. Sometimes it might just be sort of, "That, and that, and this, and what the hell's that got to do with other Dharma I've heard, and emptiness and all the rest of it?" And also, maybe some times where you will literally hear things that you're not hearing now. You think, "Well, I was in the room when they said that, and I've just heard it now, on the sixth time I'm listening," or whatever.
So it could be you in the future with your daily home practice, off retreat, and just giving yourself a period of time when you're really getting into jhāna practice. It could be you in some time, and you've decided to do a three-year jhāna retreat, just on jhānas. And why not, if you want to? That would be a beautiful thing to do. And my hope is that the material on this retreat will serve you all through those three years. You basically have what you need. So that's how I'm thinking of it. And I know that some of you, it's no problem. I know that some of you are struggling with all this stuff. So that's the way I get my head around it. Open the view, open the view -- time-wise, people-wise, etc.
[42:36] Someone said to me (I don't know when it was, a year or two ago): "You know, I hate it. I hate when you talk about sensitivity, Rob." [laughter] "And that word 'subtle' -- it really winds me up." [laughter] And with this person, I think, partly it was pushing on a self-view that they had: that they weren't sensitive, and they couldn't be subtle, and all that stuff. I'll come back to that in a second.
Let's get clear before I come back to that. Let's get clear: what's the simplest big-picture thing I need to be clear about? We talked about a base practice or a springboard practice, right? The most preferable criterion we're adopting for "What should my base or springboard practice be?" is whatever practice makes pīti easiest to arise, and most reliably. That's it. So I choose my base practice, whatever practice gives rise most reliably and most easily to pīti. Or let's not even say pīti -- to feeling good in this space, to the body feeling good. Let's just actually say that, not even pīti. So that's one large principle, just in terms of, if you feel a bit lost, that's one large principle.
Second large principle in terms of the instructions, like a simple, global take on the instructions -- there's a base practice; how do I choose that? Second is this idea of a learning edge playground. And what is that? I want to find what my learning edge playground is, and I want to marinate in it. I want to hang out there. That's the place where I'll spend 90 per cent of my time, if I can. And that marinating includes working, playing, tweaking. It doesn't just mean kind of hanging out there in some kind of stupor or non-responsive, non-attuned, non-active playing way. So what's my learning edge playground? And I need to marinate in there, which includes working, playing, and tweaking. And I need to work, play, tweak until I have mastered all the -- what is it that you call the thing in a playground, the slide and all those ...?
Yogi: Seesaw.
Rob: Yeah, but the collective word ... Equipment! [laughter] Until I've mastered all the equipment. [laughter] It's somehow not a very romantic word, but until I've mastered all the equipment in that particular playground -- so I want to marinate there, and I want to master, both of which take working, playing, tweaking.
If, as you're listening to this, you can already do A, B, C of what I listed of the mastery, and what's involved in mastery, but you can't do D, whatever that is, then D is exactly what you need to be working and playing with and working on doing. That's where you want to fill out your sense of what mastery is there. If you can do all the elements of what's involved in mastery at a certain level -- let's say with the first jhāna, whatever it is -- already, then either it should be the case that naturally, organically, by that point, the second jhāna has already appeared, just naturally, inevitably. That's usually the case. It's already evolved to the next jhāna -- for example, the second jhāna from the first. If it's not the case, if you've really got all the mastery down and it's still not the case, then it needs a little bit of wizardry, trickery, subtle little things you can try that just nudge it and encourage it, encourage that sapling with the sprout to come, the bud to unfold and show itself. [46:49] That's what you need to bring to interviews. Or if not, we'll obviously get to it in the teachings.
So when we talk about 'playground,' it could be any jhāna, okay? Your playground could also be, still, the base springboard practice. It doesn't matter. What matters is the big principle in orienting, and understanding those basic principles. That's the big picture of orienting to these instructions.
I started to say before: if very little of this energy business makes sense, or this talk about sensitivity and subtlety, or perhaps like this person I was talking about, just "I really don't like all this talk about energy, and attunement, and subtlety, and sensitivity" -- if that's the case, and if you're not even sure which base practice, which springboard practice actually feels best, then just choose one. Actually, I don't think this is the case for anyone at this point in this room, but I'll say it anyway: just choose one. For example, just choose the breath at the nostrils or in the abdomen. And if you don't like all this talk about sensitivity and energy and da-da-da-da, then just concentrate on that point. Concentrate on the feelings, the sensations at that point. When the mind gets distracted, come back to it, and concentrate on it again. And when the mind gets distracted again, return and concentrate, without judging, without any to-do. Just come back again and again and again. Return a googolplex times. You know what a googolplex is? It's the biggest -- 10 to the 10 to the 10 or something. Is that right?
Yogi: 100.
Rob: Anyway, it's a lot. [laughter] It's really -- just over and over and over. It's a really basic instruction. Just do that, okay? To which I will add two more pieces of instruction: (1) One is, when a hindrance arises, do not sit there putting up with it. Do something about it. From that list that we gave, just do something about the hindrance. (2) Second piece of instruction: can I learn to refine my concentration a little bit? Which means playing with those three things I said: (1) intensity, (2) delicacy, and (3) directionality. In other words, play with those. Learn to move the sliders up and down, turn the dials up and down. So if you don't like any of this other stuff, just do that. Do that, and trust in it, and it will deliver its fruit.
Okay, so maybe we'll cut there.
Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising (Devon: Hermes Amāra, 2014). ↩︎
