Дебаты дьявола с ангелом, часть 6: Как наблюдать за своими мыслями (2013, Феникс), занятие 1

[Говорящий 1]
This one has four different modules and you can just do different pieces of it if you don't have time. And it gets more sophisticated as it goes through. Okay, so we'll start.

[Говорящий 2]
So, please sit up straight. Work on your face, make your face relaxed.

[Говорящий 1]
Your face carries all the tensions of the day and the tensions of your life at any given period in your life.

[Говорящий 2]
Check in on your forehead. Relax your forehead. Check out the corners of your mouth.

[Говорящий 1]
These are indicators of how your life is going right now. If you're having a hard time, the corners of your mouth will be tight.

[Говорящий 2]
Loosen up the corners of your mouth. Try to smile a little bit. A really good place to look at your face is the eyelids.

[Говорящий 1]
Check your eyelids. See if there's any tension in your eyelids. And release your eyelids.

Relax your eyelids. There's tiny muscles in your eyelids and relax them. When you concentrate on your eyelids, your mouth goes back to the way it was before.

And when you concentrate on your mouth, your forehead crunches down again. See if you can loosen all three at the same time.

[Говорящий 2]
Loosen your forehead, your eyelids, and the corners of your mouth.

[Говорящий 1]
Now bring your shoulder blades slightly together, and it will puff out your chest slightly. So, lower your shoulders. Relax your shoulders.

And in the back, bring the shoulder blades a little bit towards each other, which will expand your chest.

[Говорящий 2]
Tighten your stomach muscles slightly.

[Говорящий 1]
Just tense them slightly, and that will create a corresponding lengthening in your lower back. So just tighten your tummy slightly. Don't try to suck it in really hard.

And just tense it slightly, which will loosen your back.

[Говорящий 2]
Check in on your hands.

[Говорящий 1]
You can have them palm up on your thighs. You can have them palms down on your thighs. You can touch your thumb to your first finger.

[Говорящий 2]
You might play with not quite touching, but having them very close to each other.

[Говорящий 1]
There's an alternate hand arrangement, which is your left palm down on your lap, left palm up first, then right palm on top of that. And you can touch your thumbs together. So either way is fine.

Every decision about your posture is an answer to the question, which posture is better for me if I don't want to move for the next ten minutes?

[Говорящий 2]
Which posture can I hold without moving for the next ten minutes?

[Говорящий 1]
If your hands are on your knees or your thighs, draw your hands a little bit towards your torso. So rather than having your hands out over your knees, slide your hands back on your thighs towards your body and puff out your chest. Check in on your forehead again, those three parts of your face, your eyelids, and the corners of your mouth.

[Говорящий 2]
Did they tighten up again? Because they will. Check in on your shoulder blades, check in on your tummy, and consciously relax your fingers.

[Говорящий 1]
The first of the four meditations will be a stillness meditation, meaning not mental stillness, but physical stillness. If you can learn to maintain complete physical stillness in your body, then the mind will follow. So the idea is, can you sit, find a comfortable place to sit, and then go completely still?

Don't... try not to blink your eyelids or move them in any way, try not to pretend your forehead is paralyzed, you can't make a wrinkle in it. Definitely don't move your hands, don't move your arms, don't move your legs.

Pretend your whole body is paralyzed. Try very hard not to cough or sniffle. There's nothing wrong with water coming out of your nose, down your lips, and dripping on your lap.

It doesn't hurt anybody. Just let it go. Pretend you can't move any part of your body.

We'll stay like this for five or ten minutes. Try not to make any noise at all. Don't make any sniffling noise, don't make any coughing noise.

Try not to swallow, and try to keep your body totally, completely still, as if you were paralyzed, and that will bring the mind to a state of stillness also. So here we go, five minutes like this.

[Говорящий 2]
Struggle to remain silent and still. Okay, you can come out of this meditation.

[Говорящий 1]
You can stretch, you can stretch your legs. You don't have to meditate on the floor. You don't have to cross your legs.

A chair is quite acceptable. It's just that your back should be straight, okay? So you don't get extra points for pain in your knees.

Was that a Mahamudra meditation? It was not a Mahamudra meditation because we didn't take our own thoughts as the object of the meditation. Then we have a debate here.

Isn't the experience of your senses part of your mind? We'll come to that. What's supposed to be the object?

What I'd like you to watch during this first of the four meditations is your body, okay? You are watching your forehead. You are watching the corners of your mouth.

You are watching your eyelids. You are watching your hands and your legs not to move. And you're watching your nose that you don't sneeze and things like that.

You can experiment with sneezes, by the way, with your autonomic body reflexes because they're not autonomic. You can override them with great concentration. So if you want to sneeze, focus very deeply and intensely on the sensation and you cannot sneeze, and you cannot sniffle also.

That's easier because you just decide you're not going to stop the stuff coming out and you let it drip on your lap and you can wash your clothes later, okay? So work on that. You will have random desires to move and examine them and just say no to your body.

Say no, we're not moving. Usually you get to do what you want, but not today. And you're not going to move.

I think, though, it's a very sensitive comment about the senses. So the awareness of your body is mental, right? So you could focus on your awareness of your body or your awareness of sounds is mental.

So you could argue in a debate ground that trying to shut down your physical senses is a mahamudra. You could have a good debate about it. It is mental.

The awareness of sounds and the awareness of movement in the room while your eyes are closed is mental. The awareness of the feeling of air on your body as you meditate is mental. So that is, in a way, you could argue it's a mahamudra.

It's close to a mahamudra, let's say. We'll compromise. It's natural over the length of a meditation for the body to start to lose its posture.

It's just natural. It's very natural. It will go in tiny, tiny fractions of an inch until after half an hour you're half an inch slouched.

And then the question is, do you straighten up or not? Straighten up slow, super slow. Straighten up extremely, extremely slow so that if someone were watching you, they wouldn't maybe be aware that you were straightening up.

And definitely don't make any sound. As you straighten, don't make any sound. That would be sort of the measure if you were straightening slow enough.

And you should correct your posture because it will naturally start to crunch again. It's just gravity. If you don't practice these things, gravity will win one day.

Everybody. And you become horizontal. And you can't get up.

That's part of the reason that we meditate. So we're going to go to the second meditation, which is a breath meditation. We're going to watch our breath.

We're going to start watching our breath. There will be two parts to the breath meditation. In the first part, we'll just watch the breath.

And then at some point halfway through, I'll say, now please try to count your breath. Just start counting your breath. So first it's just an awareness of exhales and inhales.

And then halfway through the breath meditation, I'll say, okay, now start counting your breath. And then I'd like you to count breaths. So the first half, you're not trying to count.

You're just observing exhales and inhales. And then second half, I'd like you to count the breath. And then there's an exercise.

It's called ukjungu. Say uk. It's like somebody's tickling you.

Uk. Uk. Ukjungu.

Ukjungu. This comes from the Abhidharmakosha. The Abhidharmakosha was one of the fundamental Buddhist teachings around third century.

And the teaching on breath meditation, which is ukjungu in Tibetan, which means to watch the exhales and the inhales. Jung means the exhales, and nguk means the inhales. Uk means breath.

That's part of the Abhidharmakosha system, and that became very popular in Burma. And then vipassana came out of that, developed by a businessman named Goenka, and that became very popular in the West. I learned to meditate first from Goenka.

He's a great meditation teacher on breath. All right. These are incremental, right?

Meaning you're not going to move. Okay? Just because we're watching the breath doesn't mean you can start fidgeting around.

Especially your legs, make sure they're comfortable. You will find with practice that if there's... you're going to need to raise the back of your seat.

That's traditional. The back of your butt should be a little higher. And then I think as you get more sophisticated with your meditation you'll find that if there's some padding under your calves it's a lot easier to meditate.

So you might want to get a big square cushion that covers your whole body, and then you might want to get one for your bottom. Okay? Keep your bottom up.

In the beginning we'll be watching exhales and inhales, and then when I say start counting I'd like you to count the exhales and the inhales. So one exhale followed by one inhale is number one. So in meditation we count exhales first and inhales second.

Okay? Not like breathing in swimming or something. So exhale is the first half of the breath.

Inhale is the second half of the breath. And that has an important significance in overcoming death. Death is the final exhale followed by no inhale.

And in the study of prana or the inner body it's considered important to count your breaths for the rest of your life, exhales first, with never a non-inhale. So we'll count breaths. The idea of breath counting is that you try to get to ten without thinking of something else.

You do an exhale and you follow it. And then you do an inhale and you follow it. And that's one.

And then if you think of breakfast, between those two, you have to start over again. That's the rule. You have to start over at one.

Okay? So if you're lucky you'll get to three. If you're really distracted you'll get to twelve.

And you'll think you're doing good. If you're really honest, three is really good? I don't know.

Three? Four? Okay.

So we'll try. Okay, here we go.

[Говорящий 2]
Start with the stillness. Go back to your stillness. Now I'd like you to start counting your breath.

Exhale.

[Говорящий 1]
Inhale. One. Exhale.

Inhale. Two. If you catch yourself thinking of something else than your breath, start over again.

[Говорящий 2]
Okay, you can please come out. You can stretch.

[Говорящий 1]
It's good to stretch. It's good to do a twist. Stretch your legs out.

Okay, so we've done two of the four meditations. The first one was just trying to be very still, on the theory that if your body is not moving then your mind moves less. And then secondly we did breath meditation.

And now the third meditation. We're going to start a more formal Mahamudra, meaning watching your thoughts. So we're going to do the third meditation will be just watching your thoughts.

And the important thing on the third meditation is not to try to control your thoughts. If you find yourself thinking terrible thoughts about somebody, you just let them go. Don't try to control them.

Don't try to stop stupid thoughts going through your mind. If you are intensely focused on waffles or something, I don't know who would do that. Just watch.

Just observe. I'm going to ask you to observe if you are thinking about the past or the present or the future. So as you just sit there quietly and observe your mind, I'd like you to just evaluate whether you are hung up on an ex-partner from 12 years ago, thinking about them, or you're worried about next week, your work.

Normally we're very limited. We're very small people. We're worried about three days ahead, two days ahead.

Your life is a lot longer than that, but normally we worry about the next few days. And then in between those thoughts, there will be some brief moments that you're actually in this room. When I went on my three-year retreat, I went to see my lama, that I had lived in his house for 25 years.

And so the last moment was very moving. The last few minutes together was very, very moving. And I was like, okay, what's he going to say?

What's the last thing he's going to say to me? Because he was very old. I didn't know if I'd see him again.

We've lived together for 25 years, and I'm like, okay, Rinpoche, what do you have to tell me about the three-year retreat? What's your final word on the three-year retreat? And he said, keep your mind in your yurt.

Don't let your mind go out of the room that you're in. And then he refused to say anything else. He wouldn't say anything else.

Just keep your mind in this room. So I want you to observe during this third meditation, is your mind thinking about the past? Is your mind thinking about next week, the future?

Or is your mind in the present moment here in this room? And it will float between the three. Just let your mind do what it usually does in the morning.

Don't try to control the thoughts. Just observe, okay? All right, here we go.

It'll be the same length of time as the first two meditations.

[Говорящий 2]
Relax your forehead.

[Говорящий 1]
Check in on those three spots on your face, the corners of the mouth, eyelids.

[Говорящий 2]
Shoulders are relaxed. Release the tension in your shoulders. Bring your shoulder blades together slightly.

Puff out your chest. Tuck your tummy. Just tuck it slightly.

And now go into a basic mahamudra.

[Говорящий 1]
Watch your thoughts. Evaluate your thoughts. Relax.

Don't try to control your thoughts. It's really what are you concerned about today, this morning. What are the issues in your life?

And you can take a little snapshot of what are the issues in your life. What's important to you this morning? Watch what thoughts come up.

Don't try to control them. Especially evaluate whether they are past or future or present.

[Говорящий 2]
Which are more? Okay, slowly come out.

[Говорящий 1]
When I was young, okay, long ago in Arizona, one day, my friend, we did musculine. We went to a canyon up north. A very beautiful abandoned desert canyon with a small stream, which is a river in Arizona.

And we took musculine. And I did it twice in my life. That was all.

But it was interesting because I was totally present for many hours. So I know what it feels like to be totally aware and present. The idea is that you meditate and you bring it on with your own mind.

I met the Dalai Lama many years ago with my mom, who was dying of breast cancer. And we went to India and we met him. And then the first thing he said to me, Have you ever taken any drugs?

And my mom's sitting there and she didn't know. So I'm faced with lying to the Dalai Lama or disappointing my mom. So I told him, Yeah, I took it twice.

And then he was very curious and he said, Oh, you should try to get there with your meditation. It's much more stable and whenever you need it, you can pull it out and you can be present. It's slower.

It takes more time. It takes practice. But it's much more beautiful, I think, to learn to be totally present.

So we're going to try a fourth meditation. That'll be the last one. Now we're going to try to control the mind.

It's like wrestling with an elephant, okay? Watch the mind as it leaves this room to what's going to happen next week, or as it leaves this room to worry about what happened last year with your friend. Stop it and bring it back to this room.

So try to relax contentedly with contentment and satisfaction and the feeling that it's okay to just be here. It's okay to plan, okay? That's a good thing.

And it's okay to review your life and try to make corrections. But let's see if we can, for five minutes, let's see if we can be totally present in this room, aware of this room. The state of happiness is mostly present.

So see if you can be in this room, keep your mind in this room, aware of this room, aware of the people around you, and satisfied to be here, just alive and happy to be here. So we'll do the same amount of time. Now struggle with your mind.

Now try to control it. Try to come to this room. I'll tell you part of the trick is to just be satisfied and be contented and be happy to be here and be grateful to be alive and relax into your life and the present moment of your life.

Here we go. It'll be the same length of time, about five minutes. Go through the other three steps quickly.

Stillness, breath, observing past and future thoughts, and then try to bring them gently to be here and happy to be here.

[Говорящий 2]
Okay, slowly come out. Slowly come out, stretch.

[Говорящий 1]
How many more present this time? More in the room. Yeah, you can do it, okay?

With practice you can do it. So I'd like you to try that four meditations. You can speed them up a little bit, okay?

But I'd like you to do it in the same order. So be very still. And then you can decide how many breaths.

You can do 20, you can do 40, you can do... I do 70. 70 breaths on stillness, 70 breaths on watching the breath, 70 breaths on checking in and seeing where my head is at.

You know, what are my concerns right now? Am I mostly living in the past or the future? And then 70 breaths on trying to be present.

And as you become more present, you will learn to be more happy, because happiness is mostly focused where you are. Okay? Thank you.