Дебаты дьявола с ангелом, часть 8: Если Эйнштейн неправ, проблемы исчезают (2014, Феникс), занятие 1

[Speaker 1]
We're going to go through some of the meditations from last night and compare them, okay? And I think you'll find that all of them are helpful. Some of them are ultimately helpful, okay?

So that's a difference. But I think the helpful ones help you to get to the ultimately helpful one, okay? So here we go.

Please sit up straight.

[Speaker 2]
Excuse the slurps, I have allergies today. You can park your hands on your lap or you can put them on your knees, whichever is more comfortable.

[Speaker 1]
When it's a little chilly I like to put them on my lap.

[Speaker 2]
And when it's warmer I put them on my knees because then you get circulation under your arms. Relax your face. Your forehead.

Relax your mouth. You can scrunch it up a bit and relax it. Relax your eyelids.

And then please come to your breath. Just watch your breath, coming and going. Try to withdraw your senses to the inside of your mind.

Tuck in your tummy slightly. And please start to count your breaths. Each out breath is a one.

[Speaker 1]
And the in breath is the second half. So please count your breaths. Try to count to ten.

Ten breaths without thinking of anything else.

[Speaker 2]
If you do think of something else then bring the count back to one and start over again.

[Speaker 1]
Then that traditional preparation for meditation has a number of parts. The first part is to invite someone to come and meditate with you. Someone you consider a teacher.

They could be alive. They could be passed away already. It could be a historical person like Jesus or Buddha.

It could be a teacher you've had in this life, like your parents, or a school teacher or the person who taught you your job. But someone you respect. Someone who's been a mentor for you in your life.

And bring them to this room. Ask them to sit in front of you, knee to knee. And try not to make them just a picture.

Try to make them alive, warm. You can feel the warmth from their body. You can smell the fragrance from their body.

You can almost hear them breathing.

[Speaker 2]
We'll sit with this teacher for a few minutes. Then it's traditional to offer them some gift in your mind.

[Speaker 1]
One tradition is to offer the sky filled with flowers, petals. And a very important tradition is to offer them some kindness you've shown to someone in the last few days. To try to review the last few days and choose something kind you did or said or thought about someone else and offer that to your teacher to make them happy.

[Speaker 2]
That's the highest form of offering. Then confess to them. Clear your conscience before you meditate.

[Speaker 1]
Something you're not so proud about doing this last week. Some mistake you made, you got angry at someone or thoughts of bad thoughts about someone and couldn't control yourself. So tell your teacher openly.

[Speaker 2]
Clear your conscience before you meditate. Next traditional preparation for meditation is to be happy about goodness.

[Speaker 1]
So I'd like you to think about something good that you saw someone else do this week. There are probably several possibilities. There are probably several things you've seen this week that were kind and beautiful and try to choose the best one that you saw last week.

The nicest thing that you saw or heard of someone else doing. And then with that, please rejoice in the fact that you created them. So if you see someone else be kind or good, then it means you have also been kind and good.

So you can get sort of a double whammy. You can appreciate the goodness of someone else and appreciate that you must have been kind and good to create them in your life.

[Speaker 2]
Next traditional preparation is to ask for teachings today.

[Speaker 1]
Ask that people give you formal teachings. Teachings are a source of change in our life, transforming ourselves. We need outside influence to change.

Ask for formal teachings and then ask for the small teachings that people give us by their good example or sometimes by challenging us.

[Speaker 2]
But ask for teaching today in your life. The last traditional preliminary before meditating is to ask the teachers to stay in your life.

[Speaker 1]
Could be parents, could be friends, could be formal teachers, but people who offer you a good example in life. They are happy, they are well mentally, physically, they have good habits, they think clearly, they are kind to other people. Ask those people to stay near you and influence you because the opposite kind of people also bring us down, drag us down.

So ask for inspiration and good example, which is true teaching in your life.

[Speaker 2]
Ask those people to stay close. And slowly come back to this room and slowly open your eyes.

[Speaker 1]
That's the preparation for meditation. So stretch. If your legs are bothering you, you can sit in a chair, it's fine.

Everyone has their eyes closed. You can sit back on the ground just before we open our eyes again. You don't get any extra credit for painful knees.

It's better if your body is just parked and you don't have to think about it. So chair can be a really intelligent choice. Do some stretch, okay?

Stretch your body. Any questions about the traditional preliminaries? No?

Okay, yes?

[Speaker 2]
When you ask your teachers for teachings, can you go into specific teachings? Because that was kind of general, but I just thought, we have such a long space, I was like, what do we do with it? So I started thinking about it.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, you can ask for special teachings, maybe about the things that you have challenges with. And then what's fun is to listen. It's just to pretend that your ears are open, you're like a, what do you call, an antenna, a TV, what do you call this big satellite dish?

And you're like, okay, tell me something, and then listen. And it will be quiet for a while, and then maybe they'll whisper something to you, and you're like, don't be jealous of so-and-so today. You know, you can try that.

It's kind of fun. It might take more than one session to get an answer. Yes, please?

[Speaker 2]
How long do you take in there? Do you have like an everyday practice?

[Speaker 1]
I think it depends on what time you got to go to Juicy Couture, wherever you work. She used to work. No, you got bought, yeah.

Personally, I like 30 breaths. I like 30 breaths for each one, but if you've got to get to work, that takes about half an hour. But if you've got to get up and go to work, then I would shorten it to like 10 or 15 breaths on each preliminary.

So you can time it with the breath. You can get to about 15 minutes if you do 10 breaths or 15 breaths on each preliminary. I think you don't want the preliminaries to be the most time.

You want them to be less than half of the time. So if you're going to meditate for an hour, you can do preliminaries for 20 breaths or 30 breaths each. For me, the first 10 breaths are distracted, and then I settle down on the second 10 breaths into that preliminary.

Personally, it takes me that long to focus on what I'm supposed to be focusing on. But you can get out of hand and do an hour on the preliminaries and not get to your meditation, or your legs hurt too bad that you can't start the real meditation, which is what we're going to do right now. Are you ready?

Okay, we're going to go into about a 20-minute meditation. Here we go. Sit up straight.

The hands, you can cup your knees and do chin mudra, or you can flip them over with the tops of your hands down on your knees and do chin mudra. I've been playing lately with halfway between those two, and it seems to work for me, like the karate edge of your hand on your knees. Then my hands don't fall asleep, so I don't know.

You can play with the chin mudra, not quite touching your finger and thumb, and see if you can feel prana jumping across like a spark plug.

[Speaker 2]
Please come to your breath. Watch your breath. Relax your mouth.

Relax your forehead. Tighten your tummy slightly. Release your eyelids.

Let them go. Don't hold them up, but don't squeeze them shut either. Please come to your breath.

Please count ten breaths to come to meditation. And please imagine that you're sitting on some soft grass at the side of a small stream out in the wilderness, far from homes and cars and cell phones. And the ground is soft and pliable, giving.

And the grass is soft and green. And the stream is a beautiful small stream, but it's a quiet stream, not a gurgly stream. And imagine that you lay back on the grass, relax, lay down, like a shavasana.

If you like, you can put your hands behind your head. Then you're just looking up at the sky, blue sky.

[Speaker 1]
And there's trees, but they don't block your view. You can't see the tree branches. So this is what they call space with no edges.

You're just looking up.

[Speaker 2]
And the whole vista, the whole view that you see is just blue sky, nothing else. Maybe a cloud or two. And we'll take a few minutes and just relax into that.

So you don't have anything to do. You have the afternoon off. And you're just looking at the sky and relaxing, not thinking about anything in particular.

If something comes, it's okay. Then let it go and keep looking at the sky. And imagine that dusk has come.

[Speaker 1]
You kind of got caught outside. Dusk has come. You start watching the stars come out one by one.

If you've ever done it, it's very beautiful. You sit on your back in some grass, and the dusk comes. And one by one the stars start to blink on in the sky.

And then I'd like you to follow that until this sky is very dark and filled with stars, beautiful clusters of stars. Then I'd like you to switch to a deeper meaning of space, which is that clear and crystalline and ineffable place in which all things lie or in which all things are suspended. So try to switch your perception of space from blue sky to the nighttime sky filled with stars to a sort of water-like, crystalline place in which all things rest, the underlying foundation of all things physically, the place in which all things stand, suspended, the earth, the sky, this dark space, yourself, your mind, they're all resting in a place, just place, invisible.

Empty place in which all things rest, in which underlies all things, foundation of all things. Try to switch your perception from sky to nighttime space to crystalline, liquid, empty place in which all things rest.

[Speaker 2]
Now one step deeper, and then we're finished. Bring your mind to each object in this room,

[Speaker 1]
and when you find one which is coming from you, like is the building coming from me, is each person here coming from some part of my personality, and how I've treated people in the past, examine each object in this room, and the building itself, and the city itself, and each part about your body, your hands, your arms, and each part of your own thoughts, and each time you find one that's coming from your own karma,

[Speaker 2]
from how you treated people, then let it disappear.

[Speaker 1]
So one by one, things in this room will disappear, and the building will disappear. Anything that's coming from your mind, let it disappear, and then in the end we should come to a fourth kind of space, a deeper kind of space, which is the absence of anything which is not coming from me. Everything's coming from me, and if I took them all away, there'd be nothing.

[Speaker 2]
So please, please come to this fourth and deepest level of space.

[Speaker 1]
Examine each object in the room.

[Speaker 2]
If it's coming from you, let it drop away and see what's left, including yourself and your mind. And slowly come back to this space. Let the objects that are coming from you return.

Come back to your breath, and when you're ready, slowly open your eyes.

[Speaker 1]
So I guess you can call that the four spaces meditation. Okay, first one is what? Just blue sky, okay?

It's this kind of space, but not so profound. But it helps you get to the other ones, right? It calms your mind down.

Second one? Yeah, black outer space, where the stars are hanging. Third one?

Place, just place, where everything stands. It's the foundation of all physical things, and you're occupying it. Yeah, the coffee cup, okay?

And then the last one? Yeah, drop all things which are coming from you, and what's left is what? Nothing, okay?

That's a deeper space. That's close to emptiness, okay? And then that can help you go to emptiness, okay?

If you keep doing this meditation, you can slide into emptiness. They say if you see that emptiness, then your life changes forever. Your whole life will change forever, okay?

You become actually a different, you evolve into a separate being. You evolve to a separate kind of human being, and then you're very close to enlightenment. An irreversible change takes place the first time you see it, and you can never go back, and you will evolve into an angel within a short time.

But it takes that to trigger it, okay? Any questions? Yeah?

[Speaker 2]
When we have something that is unchanging, then it can't be produced by something which is changing. You know, when you have something like the space, which is...

[Speaker 1]
Place.

[Speaker 2]
Place.

[Speaker 1]
Good. Number three, let's say.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, you say it doesn't change. Then how can the mind, which is changing, pursue such a place?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, good. Did you understand? Oh, yeah.

So, a changing thing cannot create an unchanging thing, okay? Because unchanging things don't get created. By the way, if you want to go deeper...

Do you want to go deeper? Unchanging things can come into existence, and they can pass out of existence, but they don't change in the process. The moment they start...

We don't even call it starting. The moment they come into existence, they are 100% what they are, and they can go out of existence. So, this clock has an emptiness to it.

When I break the clock, the emptiness is gone, but it didn't change, okay? It didn't get less or more. Okay, you have to work with that.

If you can work with that, that's the meaning of subtle impermanence, and you can go very deep. Some people say subtle impermanence is the fact that things are changing instant by instant. That's not deep enough.

So anyway, how can a changing thing create something which is unchanging? How can a changing thing even relate to an unchanging thing? What's the interface, right?

Like my mind is constantly changing instant by instant, but the fact of place, for example, space number three, that's unchanging. The clock can occupy space, and the clock can withdraw from that space, but the space doesn't change. The space is eternal and it doesn't...

Its quality never changes. It's occupado or no occupado, but it doesn't change whether you put something in it or not, okay? So how can an instantaneously shifting mind perceive a thing which is...

How can it think about an object which is not changing? And I think the answer lies somewhere in you're not really seeing the space, you're seeing your imagination of it. So you're seeing a mental construct, which is, by the way, changing instant by instant, but you're actually seeing a karmic ripening of your own mind.

You're watching a karmic ripening of your own mind, which is the imagination of empty space, okay? Try that. Try that on.

See how it fits, okay? But it's true, it's a deep question. Because the direct perception of emptiness is the same.

How can a momentarily shifting mind see something which never changes? One more question, and then we've got to get dressed for yoga. Again, I think through the medium of a mental construct, which is the result...

It's not... It's a direct perception of a mental construct. Well, I used to have trouble with that because some texts say it's not, but then it couldn't be a result of karma.

[Speaker 2]
So you can never really perceive emptiness directly, you can only perceive the construct.

[Speaker 1]
To see the construct is to see emptiness directly. Because otherwise you get into this thing of... Does emptiness...

Is emptiness coming from a karmic state, you see?

[Speaker 2]
What about if you're perceiving emptiness directly, you're not aware of it at the time anyway, and so afterwards...

[Speaker 1]
You're aware of the emptiness, but you're not aware of yourself perceiving it. You're certainly aware of emptiness.

[Speaker 2]
But you're not aware that you're perceiving it.

[Speaker 1]
No, because you can't be aware of a changing thing at that time.

[Speaker 2]
Subsequently then you do, and then you can perceive it with a mental construct.

[Speaker 1]
Then you perceive yourself seeing emptiness, which is changing. I think you have to go there. Otherwise emptiness doesn't come from karmic state.

Think about it. But what do you call it? Content-wise it feels different.

It feels like unchanging, something unchanging. What do you call it? Subjectively it feels like something you've never felt before.

Okay? The content of the construct you've never felt before. Yes.

Oh, afterwards you make up stories about it.

[Speaker 2]
Okay?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, you can't... The memory of it is imperfect. It's never...

The memory of it is never as powerful as the real thing. It's like your first kiss when you were in high school, or earlier nowadays, I guess. Oh, you can...

I guess, yeah, technically you remember that you remembered it the moment after you came out of it, something like that, technically. But you still, maybe deductively, you spent that 20 minutes somewhere, like that. You can still remember it, but the memory is imperfect.

It's not the direct perception of emptiness. And we're going to talk about it. It's the last verse of the text, if we get there.

In this class, in this course, it talks about that. There are ten bodhisattva levels, or eleven, depending on who you talk to. And as you go through the last three, or seven, eight, nine especially, your ability to go back to what you saw changes.

Up until the last moment of level seven, your memory of what you saw is infected by seeing things the wrong way still. And only when you hit level eight, the first moment of level eight, do you stop having a memory which is infected. Okay?

Okay. All right. The last meditation preparation which happens after you meditate, so I don't know if you can call it a preparation, is to dedicate the good karma of meditating.

You can't see emptiness if you're not in meditation. It's not possible. So try to get on your meditation cushion every day.

Okay, Daniel, you ready? This is the dedication. Okay.

Okay. Then dedicate the good karma. It's a very high good karma to talk about emptiness and to play with it.

This meditation is extremely expensive karma to get to it, and it creates even more expensive karma. It's like a good investment, especially if you give it away. All right then.