«Дар освобождения», курс 2 «Прорыв к высшей реальности», занятие 1

[Говорящий 1] (0:00 - 5:57)
Okay, let's start. The first of the nine levels is called senjopa. Sen means mind, and jopa means to find the mind, to start the mind off.

So senjopa means your first thought-like attempts to put your mind on a particular object. That's the first level. It's characterized by nepa.

Nepa means the mind does reach the object. The mind, you do choose an object. Today, for example, we're going to choose as an object our teacher.

Whoever is your heart teacher. It could be Gandhi. It could be someone who's not alive anymore.

It could be someone you haven't met yet and you just fantasize about. Or if you're fortunate, then you already have a heart teacher. You will be meditating on your heart teacher, and particularly their eyes.

So senjopa, how do you know that you've reached level number one? You see it in the next ten minutes. That teacher comes to your mind once.

Okay? Usually it's at the beginning. It's the first 20 seconds or so.

And you bring up your teacher, and then you think about the emails you didn't get to before you came. And then ten minutes later, the teacher says, okay, let's stop there. And then sometimes you're lucky that your teacher doesn't pop up.

You see your teacher again for 20 seconds, and then you, that's it. So senjopa means the mind is on the object. But just briefly at the beginning, maybe, and then maybe a few times in between.

And then some at the end. So we can say that the nepa, or the staying on the object, is only momentary. My teacher, he used to like to compare it to a fly on a piece of poop.

He was pretty graphic, okay? He would say, okay, I'll tell you the whole story. There were two flies in Pasa City, and they landed on a cow bike.

And so they were having a discussion. Since it was near the Potala, and they were in a site that was very divinable, they were having a philosophical discussion about nirvana and paradise. And then they got to a point about that discussion, and one fly said to another, do you think there's cow parsing in paradise?

And the other one said, I don't think so. And the other one said, well, why do you think you want to go there? Anyway, the moral being that we live in a pile of poop.

Okay, and we like it. So why did I bring that up? Oh, because flies.

They just land for a second, and then they decide they want to go to another pile of poop, and they keep going like that. So you can think of level one as the fly on the poop level, all right, where your mind is just jumping around, and it comes to that reason. The nirvana, the staying, is infinitely shorter than the yama, which means the time-loss process.

So that's the same jopa. The goal, by the way, and what I want you to think about the whole ten days, the real sort of goal that I'd like you to think about the whole ten days is interesting. Meditation, I think, can be more concisely or clearly described as keeping your mind on one thing, just one thing.

So I would even change—the word in Tibetan is tingzin, or in Sanskrit, ekabra, which means one thing. Just keep your mind on one thing. So the struggle—what I like is to think of the word meditation as ekabra.

Maybe we should call it ekabra. It'll be, can you just have one thing that you're thinking about and nothing else in meditation? Can you just have your teachers finish there and there's nothing else?

There's nothing else in the world, which technically means that you would die sitting there if you were good at it, because you would forget to come out, you see? You would forget to drink or eat or, you know, anything. You would just sit there.

If your concentration is really good, you probably have to ask someone to— Je Tsongkhapa went into someone. Somebody had to come back to the temple. He was in a meeting like this, and then everybody went and had lunch, you know, and then in the evening they came back and he was still there.

And they had to wake him up because he forgot to go to lunch, you know, because he was just thinking about one thing. So I guess technically, if you're good at it, you wouldn't remember to stop meditating. Or even the alarm, if the alarm went off, you wouldn't hear it, right?

And it gets to that point, okay? So you'd have to have a—you know how you go swimming in the ocean? You're supposed to have a body?

Maybe if you were really good at meditating, you'd have to have a body to wake you, to shake you up, you know, to knock you out of the meditation. So it should be like that. I want you to start thinking of meditation as your mind tied to a single thing.

I visualize it as the way they picture those atoms. What do you call those? Those toys that have connecting things between them?

What did they call it, John, when we were young?

[Говорящий 2] (5:57 - 5:58)
Tinker toys.

[Говорящий 1] (5:59 - 6:00)
Tinker toys.

[Говорящий 2] (6:00 - 6:01)
Yeah.

[Говорящий 1] (6:01 - 7:13)
So there were little disk-like things with holes on the side, and then you had a—you're going to have trouble translating this into Chinese, maybe. You had a little stick between, and then that happens. Okay, anyway.

Your mind is one of the tinker toy disks, and then the object, which is going to be your teacher's face or eyes, is going to be another tinker toy piece, and then you're going to be linking them, and there's no other links to anything. There's no other object. It's just that one.

So just think that there's no other connection to any other object. There's a single line, and there's a single object, and there's one tinker toy stick between them. And there's no side sticks going off to your e-mails, or once you've got, you know, the things you did done before you came, or for lunch, or how cold it is, or anything.

Just try to picture your mind as a single unit. The object is a single unit, and they are tied together, and that's it. So that's meditation.

[Говорящий 2] (7:16 - 7:18)
Is that virtuous?

[Говорящий 1] (7:22 - 10:00)
Carl said no, and he's right. It's currently neutral. It's an instrument.

It's a microscope. Virtuous. You see, it's just a tool.

It's just an instrument. We went to a city in China where there had been some atrocities during World War II, and they used microscopes on living humans that they cut open to observe living blood, you know, and then they blew them up with grenades to develop new treatments for soldiers. So that would be a non-virtuous use of a microscope.

That would be an evil use of a microscope. And then, you know, microscopes are used to save lives every day. So meditation is similar.

It's currently neutral. It's just a tool. It's just an instrument.

So then that's very important to understand. It's just an instrument. You can turn meditation upon anger, thinking about your last ex-boyfriend or girlfriend or whatever, and you can concentrate.

And you can be obsessed on them and think about how bad they are. And that's a non-virtuous use of a microscope, because it's just an instrument, right, and trying to keep it unwinded. So I'm going to just talk for five, 10 minutes at a time, and then we'll do a 10-minute meditation, and then we'll flip-flop like that.

It's called random flip-flop. So get ready for random flip-flop. My mom, Krispy, when she does a booktube class, she always gives people this guilt trip that the person next to you is on the verge of seeing emptiness, and you sniffle, and then they spend 24,000 more lives in the midst of a lot of suffering.

Okay? So I wouldn't say that to you. Just spit all your clutter out.

There's nothing wrong with not looking out loud. Okay? Once it starts, just let it go.

You can speak through your mouth and let it happen. All right. Our only goal for the first session is to go, we're going to go through the preliminaries, the traditional preliminaries.

Pablo Carabachan, in a different part of the text, which you'll be studying mainly in a year, he goes through the preliminaries very carefully. But right now, we're just going through them together. And then we'll stop.

Then we'll talk some more about the novels.

[Говорящий 2] (10:00 - 18:54)
So here we go. Step three. Watch the breath in your coming in and out of your nose.

Place your mind like a sentry at the tip of the nostrils. Just watch the breath passing in and out. Mind as a single object, the breath.

Mind tied to a single object, the breath. Ask your teacher to come to this side. Sit with you.

We are sitting in front of you. Knees to knees. You can feel the warmth of your body.

You can feel the breath in your face. You can smell the fragrance of the skin. Make your teacher love you.

Follow someone. Sky is the best. You can smell the scent of the landscape.

And then sprinkle it with some good teaching from the last three proverbs. Think of something in the last three proverbs that you know so close by. Maybe you got a little anxious.

Maybe you're afraid. Maybe, in my case, you said something harsh to someone. Maybe you're tired.

Equal time effort. Equal time effort. Thinking about something so you can get it in the last three proverbs.

Be kind. Tell your teacher about it. Think of something you saw someone else do that was inspiring and virtuous.

Something that you like to do. The last three proverbs. Keep going.

A lot of people want you to experience this with them. A lot of our own stuff. Spend months getting everything ready for ourselves.

Inspiring thinking. Ending. Let us make a picture and a reminder of who you'd like to be at the end of these ten days.

What would you like to change about yourself?

[Говорящий 1] (18:56 - 19:07)
If you could make it happen simply by wishing, who would you like to be at the end of these ten days? What change should be brought in you?

[Говорящий 2] (19:08 - 21:42)
Make a picture of yourself as you would like yourself to be at the end of these ten days. Ask your teacher, your life teacher, whoever it is, ask them to help you become happy in these ten days. We will each need our own part of this lesson in the next ten days to make the changes in our practice that we want to see.

Ask your teacher to stay with you. You can't go anywhere. You can't succeed at anything without a teacher, without a life teacher.

Ask them, even if they are a historical person or someone who is around you now, ask them in their spirit. Even if it's someone who you hope to meet in the future, ask them to come and stay with you for the rest of your life. Make this story open your eyes.

The second I want to take is called Yudha Yoga.

[Говорящий 1] (21:45 - 26:14)
Yud means continuity or stream. There is a variation of the word called Yud, which can mean tantra. For example, meeting the stream of the secret teachers.

Or the stream, mind stream in Tibet is called Yud, also. So, Yud means any kind of stream. In Chinese it's Jinmei.

But it's a stream. So, Yud to Dzogpa. Dzogpa again means the application of the mind to the subject.

So, Yud to Dzogpa means your mind is on your object. And instead of being a fly on the cloud line, there is some continuity. It stays on the object for more than a second.

So, you do have some flow on the object. So, Yud to Dzogpa, the second level, is where you are able to keep your mind on the object for short periods of time. Importantly, in the first and second levels, the period of time on the object is much briefer than the period of time off the object.

So, if you're keeping score, and you want to know where you are, at level two and level one, the time on the object is defined as briefer than the network. So, if you kept score of seconds or minutes on the object, the time off the object would be more than the time on the object in the first two levels. I would say most of us are at level two.

I believe that. I am, actually, sometimes. So, more time off the object, but there is some continuity.

Like, you have five seconds, five uninterrupted seconds, on your teacher's face, before you think of the noise of the heater, or someone bangs the cup. We have to negotiate with these kinds of things. We don't have meditation time.

But, you know, maybe afterwards. I think we have to be diplomatic, and we have to mostly let people know what the times are. And not just run in there and say, shut up.

And that's the same with your family. You can take this as a metaphor for your life. You're going to have to negotiate with the people around you.

Like the people smashing the cups in you. You're going to have to negotiate with the people in your life. What's the easiest way is to...

People can handle that you're not going to be around them. They know it is predictable. So, you have to make your meditation times predictable to your family members or your friends.

And they have to understand. And it has to be negotiated kindly and fairly. You're not responsible, at least to them.

And you have to go in and reason what you have to say. And if it's predictable, it's more likely to be successful than negotiation. So from, you know, we're going to be meditating from 9.30 to 10.30. But from 10.30 you can smash all the cups you want because we're going to be doing yoga. You know, like that. So then you kind of give and take. And that's just a metaphor for your meditation practice for the rest of your life.

Make it... Things can be negotiated with your family because it's predictable. And it's clear ahead of time.

Not during. Okay. So the first two vowels.

Sem-to. Say sem-to. Sem-to.

Gim-to-to. Gim-to-to. Okay.

So, fly on a cow-fly. And then sam-ka. Gim-to-to means sam-ka.

Sam is a main-ka. Who knows main-ka? A negative statement that implies a positive statement.

Sam-ka really means not much. Okay.

[Говорящий 2] (26:14 - 26:14)
All right.

[Говорящий 1] (26:23 - 30:14)
Now, the goal of this week as far as your meditation is that you learn the nine levels and the six powers and the four states of mind. So there will be nine levels, six powers, four states of mind. By the way, next meditation session you know to bring some notebook.

So I'll go over it again. You're going to bring your poster and you're going to bring your notebook. Because everything I'm talking about is on your poster, but sometimes not so obviously.

So, there are going to be nine levels of meditation. There are going to be six powers or strengths with which you achieve those levels. And then there will be four states of mind through which your mind passes as you move up to the nine levels.

So, the first level, sam-jo-pa, is achieved. So, jo-pa is shu-ti in Sanskrit. It means listening.

And what it means is listening to the words of a human teacher. So, like you can learn Chinese on the, you can buy Rosetta Stone and have the pig yell at you. But it's so much different than sitting in the back of the car in Shanghai and having someone yell at you five times.

You know, how to say it and correct you. That, the correction part is really important. You say, ji-ge-shi-shi-ma.

And then they say, ge-sha-la-sa-ma-shi-ge-shi-shi. And you know, you have a human being sitting there correcting you. So, ta-pa, shu-ti, means listening to the words of a human being directly.

And, you know, if you can't get to Prescott, you don't have chains on your jetliner. You know, we're offering the streaming teachings and we're offering the tapes. And you can download it, but it's not going to be the same.

Human being, shu-ti means hearing at the feet of a human being. So the first level of meditation, which is really sort of, you could say, it's the decision to meditate, right? It's the decision to sit down and place your mind on the object for the first time.

That decision is precipitated by some teacher who convinces you that this is going to be useful for you. No human being will do anything at all unless they think they'll get something helpful or beneficial for themselves. This is how we are.

So it's the teacher's job to inspire you to think about what's going to happen to you if you learn to meditate. And that's chöpei-tok. So I'm going to do a little chöpei-tok, okay?

There are, in Vinaya, especially in the monks' teachings, for the monks' vows, there are four traditional forms of sustenance. It's very famous. It's called seishi, seishi, seishi, seishi, seishi, seishi, seishi, seishi.

Sei means literally it means food, but here it means sustenance. Shi means forms. Sei in Chinese, sorry.

Four types of, shi shan, four types of sustenance, okay? The first one is called kanpisei. Say kanpisei.

Kanpisei. Kan? Do you know kan?

Have you ever heard of kan? Anybody know what kan means? Kan.

[Говорящий 2] (30:15 - 30:15)
It's an area.

[Говорящий 1] (30:16 - 30:47)
Yeah, she said it's an area. There's a province into that called kan. The word means province.

Why they would name a province province, I don't know. Okay, but it does mean an Arizona state, okay? But kan means a state.

But it can also mean what? Yeah, it can mean your propensities. Like your hidden propensities for your life.

You know, like some people discover at a certain age that they were meant to be an upright bass player.

[Говорящий 2] (30:48 - 30:49)
You see?

[Говорящий 1] (30:49 - 31:19)
Their whole life. Their cause was there. And then you suddenly you touch the thing and you're like, ah.

Like you get somebody's dad's miraculous instrument and you put your hand on it. Oh, then the kan. Kan.

You see your kan. So kan in that sense means a little parcel in your heart of what you were meant to do. What you were meant to be.

It's also called kan. What's another meaning of kan? True doctrine.

[Говорящий 2] (31:22 - 31:27)
A discreet piece of something. No, that's the last one. So what's true doctrine?

[Говорящий 1] (31:31 - 32:57)
Yeah, there's two realms. The former and the former self. Sorry, desire, former and former self.

We live in the desire realm. It's all you got to see. There are two other realms that are happily parallel universes.

That are happily parallel to this world. And you can see that in meditation. It's also called kan.

Like an area of the universe. Three provinces of the universe. In Amida Nama there's the 18 kans.

Which is your six senses. Six objects of the senses and six consciousnesses of the senses. Those are also called doctrine.

The most famous one is dharma doctrine. Which is the object of the mental sense. And then that became the name of a dharma organization.

So that's dharma doctrine. Kam kisei, kam in that sense means a discreet bit of something. Which is defined as something you can bite off.

Like a banana is kam kisei. Because you can bite off a piece of something. So kam kisei is the first kind of sustenance.

Physical sustenance. Everybody needs it. Everybody needs kam kisei.

So the second kind of sustenance is rewa. Say rewa. I don't have to roll up laundry to get them.

I can't, so I just make them. Rewa. So rewa means...

I'm sorry.

[Говорящий 2] (32:58 - 32:59)
Did I say rewa?

[Говорящий 1] (32:59 - 33:08)
Skip that. Let's do the second number two. That's not what I'm saying.

Number two is ni. Say ni kisei. Ni kisei.

[Говорящий 2] (33:08 - 33:08)
Ni kisei.

[Говорящий 1] (33:09 - 42:58)
Ni means sleep. Okay. Probably REM sleep or something.

Okay. I need a block of five hours and I can't function. I don't know what it is for you.

I need seven to eight to be polite. And that's not me. So it's a kind of sustenance.

Everybody needs sleep. Most people. Not just everybody.

Most humans need sleep. And it's a kind of sustenance. So, of course, I know that you're not going to wake up...

If you wake up earlier than your roommates, you're going to sit quietly in bed and try not to... What do you call this? Do you just drink too much?

Or do you have to go pee pee? You're going to be super quiet. I don't know.

Sit down so they don't hear you. Okay. But that's ni kisei.

People need that sustenance or they can't function. So that's the second kind of food. The third one is called REWA.

Say REWA. REWA. REWA means hope.

Okay. Hope is a kind of sustenance. If you have hope for the future, if you have plans for the future, if you have a meaningful project to work on, if you have a meaningful work to do, meaningful work to do, some kind of hope for the future, some kind of...

What do you call it? It's like looking forward to something. Aspirations.

Aspirations or looking forward to your life. I want to do this by next week. I'm doing something important.

Let's help me care for the tree. You have some kind of meaningful future thought, pace. Okay.

It's called REWA. And in the scriptures they say if there's a horse which is coming to the desert by itself and it starts to die first, right? And then suddenly it's going to die in 10 feet.

So in 10 feet it drops to its knees. And then it's just reached a little sand dune and then it sees a big oasis like 200 yards down the sand dune. And by all rights it should have died on the sand dune.

It had no more physical sustenance to move the legs of the horse. But soon the water will be... No horse ever died 100 yards from water.

Never. No human ever stopped, you know, like 10 seconds from reaching the ground. Something makes...

Hope can sustain you physically to do the rest. So that's hope. Last one.

It's called TING-YI-ZING-YI-TSE. Say TING-YI-ZING. TING-YI-ZING.

TING-YI-ZING. That's uninterrupted concentration. Okay.

It's a sustenance for the mind and body. Uninterrupted focus on anything is a necessary sustenance for human beings. Okay.

You cannot live without moments of uninterrupted focus. That's why I was in a corporate environment for a long time. And I saw people break down and drop down.

And we worked sometimes, you know, 18 hours a day. And then you would push somebody. You would give them three more tasks.

Or they'd be in the middle of a task, and then you'd get a priority. You have to change priorities. That's one of the most destructive things in a corporate environment.

Someone's cruising along okay on a very difficult job, and then you say, Wait, stop that and do this. And then they handle one interruption, and they handle two interruptions. Interrupt them ten times a day.

Interrupt their focus ten times a day. Change their priority ten times a day. And you can break anybody.

You can break any group of employees that way. As soon as they get focused on one task, which is pretty much an impossible task, but they're going for it, and then you say, Stop that and do this. And then people break down.

People just break. So people, human beings, the mind and the psyche and the body are sustained by uninterrupted time to focus. That's why reading a book is so enjoyable.

Or taking out your boyfriend. Or watching a movie. Or anything which is uninterrupted concentration.

And then people will get irritable the more you break their concentration. They're in the middle of something. They're really focusing on that movie or something.

And then you say, Can you wash the dishes? And then you can break a person like that. So this fourth kind of sustenance is perhaps the most necessary for a human being.

And that's one way. I'm being truthful. I'm trying to sell you on starting the first novel.

Because somebody has to sell you or you won't do it. There has to be a reason to that. Because I'm selling you on the first novel of meditation.

You need it to live. You cannot be happy without meditating. It's not going to happen.

You need times of uninterrupted focus. A human being lives off that. And it's like with a cup.

It's like almond milk as opposed to a Coke. In my cup. I might prefer a Coke.

Or a coffee. Say a coffee. But the almond milk is going to make me.

I drink almond milk knowing that in two hours it's going to make me really smart and focused. I control myself. I like coffee.

I used to drink a lot of coffee. But I know that the coffee is not going to give me what I need. But I know if I drink almond milk which is less pleasant for me than coffee.

I know that in an hour I'm going to be really. My mind is going to be focused. My body is going to be strong.

I'm going to feel healthy. So meditation is like that. Meditation is like that.

The decision to partake of Ting Nzing Gisei is a really wise one. You're busy. You don't have time to meditate.

You have other things to do. And you make a decision. And you draw a line.

And you say I'm going to meditate. It's like drinking almond milk. It's like I'd rather do email.

And that's like coffee. I'd rather do something that's A.D.B. Because that has a sort of shallow attraction. Like coffee.

But I know if I take the almond milk, my mind will be healthy and strong and feel sustained. So that's a selling point for meditation. If you do.

If you keep your mind on a single object for 15 minutes in the entire day, it can sustain in a way that you cannot imagine. Just sitting with your teacher, watching their eyes. What does it do for you?

The fact that your mind is not moving to another object sustains you big time. It sustains your body and your mind. And you become much healthier, stronger, happier.

Immensely happier. And it's weird. Somebody says to you, just keep your mind on anything for 15 minutes a day.

And you'll be a much happier person. It's because it sustains. It's a kind of sustenance.

And you can't live without it. We've been living without it. And that's why so many people are unhappy.

It's as if they were woken up every night by somebody. And your whole life, it's all your mind has been interrupted your whole life by the demands of your life. And what I'm suggesting is check it out.

Do 15 minutes of true sustenance every day. And then you'll feel much happier, much more human, much more alive. You have a real life.

Okay? That's TIPA, okay? Truth.

Buy TIPA, you'll gain what? Buy the sales pitch for your personal level. You're good.

First level. That's what pushes you into first level. Got it?

I want you to learn the levels. Why? Because I want you to be a teacher.

Okay? Because I want you to teach. Okay?

I want, you know, we went to Asia. We've taken about 40 teachers with us now. And the programs are designed that we have to have 40 teachers.

We need 300 teachers for the programs. Okay? We need 300 teachers.

And you've got to learn. You shouldn't come out in 10 days unable to give somebody what you're getting right now. Okay?

You should come out nine levels, six hours, four days a month. You must come out like that. Okay?

You must learn to teach. Okay, we'll do one more brief. We'll stop.

How many minutes have you done TIPA? Four? Five?

Ten? Okay? It's all right.

It's not the quality of the meditation. It's not quality. It's just the quality.

Okay? 15 minutes of quality meditation must sustain the quality. Okay?

All right. So remember, the first session we did, we did five minutes.