Full Transcript

How transformation happens

So welcome to another Finding Ground Dharma Talk. Tonight we're going to explore the path from the perspective of how we actually transform. The simplest way of talking about the journey that has been handed down through all of these generations, what it is and how it is branched off into different types of practice that take different spans of time to produce their results. It's important that meditators understand what is on offer so they can make good decisions about how to spend their practice time.

The need for a modern path

Some practice paths are wonderful if you have a long life and you can practice in an uninterrupted way. And some practice paths are much more beneficial if you live in a time of great turmoil. Now, April and I present these paths, these traditional paths, in a format that many of you know because you've been to retreats with us, where we assemble the training systems that are on offer into two major categories of practice. We call one of them Finding Ground, and we call another of them Becoming Whole. Both of these have strong ties to the traditional presentation of meditation that's found in the Indian Buddhist systems and a little bit of the Advaita Vedanta systems too.

The traditional way that isn’t modernized

Traditionally, one would learn everything that they need. They would gather an understanding of who and what they are, what the world is, what confusion is, and what liberation from confusion is, and they'd be able to take their time. They'd practice in a community. They'd practice with teachers. They would spend time regularly practicing, probably in person with the community and maybe even their teachers. That's the way it's always been done with both teachers and community.

Community is often a gathering of people sharing the same stages of the path, but also people a few steps ahead as well as the newbies just entering it for the first time. The teachers are usually a population who have spent decades on the path and are able to train and transmit the practices, the outlook, and the meaning and inspiration of the path.

So again, ideally, one might be part of a community where there are many teachers. All of our teachers grew up in an environment where there was no shortage of any of this. Their entire world was shaped by previous generations of practitioners who were very knowledgeable and had normalized the knowledge and the outlook and had simply accepted the possibilities of training on the path. To many of the traditional teachers from those traditional settings, the path is very uncomplicated. Yeah, there's a lot that you can do, but that's looked at as sort of a feast. They often call it a feast of Dharma. So the earlier you begin in your life, the more of that you can take on, and the more you can work all the dimensions of this 3,000-year-old path into your approach.

When you meet people from these cultures, they're very settled in their practice. Whether they're particularly transformed or not, they're still very settled. All of this makes sense to them. It's almost as if this is what they learned right out of the cradle. So things like past and future lives, karma, and the magic of tantric practice, the stages of enlightenment, this is all real to them. And they don't think of it as, oh, they believe something that's hard for others to believe. It's just the way the world is to them.

What about us?

That is not the case for us. Even if you've been practicing and studying and familiarizing yourselves with the culture of these traditions for most of your life, you're still living in a world that holds all of this with a lot of skepticism. Skepticism that's not necessarily rooted in anything intelligent, just skepticism of something different. And man, is the meditation path ever something different from what we have. The meditation path talks about things with such articulate language that we don't even have words for. We haven't even begun to explore the possibilities of these things, and yet there are cultures that enjoy 3,000 years of expertise in this.

Challenge #1: depth of knowledge and methods

So when we come into a path like this, most of us are hit with the wall of just unfathomable depth, intricacy, history, knowledge, practice. It's so vast that we don't really know what to do, and that can cause us to kind of peter out after our early enthusiasm cools off. So we need a practice approach that is appropriate for where we are. But we shouldn't make assumptions of where we are based on superficial observations of how crazy we seem. Because we all seem pretty crazy, pretty distracted. That doesn't mean that we should start at the very, very beginning. It doesn't. Maybe we should. Maybe some of us should. But probably a lot of us would become very frustrated if we started at the very beginning of the path.

Challenge #2: watered-down popular teachings

The other thing that we can often enter into—and again, I don't think that I'm speaking to a group of people who've done this—is a watered-down version that has forgotten where it even comes from. So this would be a collection of meditation techniques that have been assembled from here or there without any real lineage, without any mastery. Often not even from a teacher, but just sort of shareware teaching. You find this all the time in yoga studios. All the time. 24-year-olds who end a session of yoga with a little bit of meditation. You also find this in apps that you can download on your phone. If these things help people, then that's a good thing. They're not harming people. But there's just no way for the transformative potential of meditation to get through if someone is starting out on a path that isn't connected to a goal. And any path that is connected to a goal is going to be profound. And there's going to be stuff that we need to learn.

Usually, this is pretty exciting to learn this stuff. But I have noticed that people who start out with these overly simplified traditions often have the perception that learning and knowledge is not a part of meditation. They could even think that using the mind at all is counterproductive for a meditator. That is crazy. And I'll just leave it there, because I know that none of you are these people. You might have the apps on your phone, but I bet that those are not giving you everything you want.

Facing the cultural challenge

When we use traditional language, whether it's from the Hindu tradition, the non-Buddhist tradition, or from the Buddhist tradition—and those really are the two main traditions of meditation that we have—everything comes from India. I think we all know that, right? Even though there's Japanese Buddhism and Chinese Buddhism and Vietnamese Buddhism, they don't come from Japan, China, and Vietnam, or Laos, or Thailand. They all come from India. All meditation and all transformative practice of this nature come from India. In particular, they come from the India of about 2,000 years ago, which was a very sophisticated culture. So these teachings really are high level. They are ready for us. And we, being a super-educated community of people—and I just mean Western people, English-speaking people that take an interest in this stuff—are all intelligent enough and literate enough to take it on.

This stuff is not above us. But when we enter into a training, we are usually going to hear a lot of stuff that is roughly translated into English in an expedient way so that people can begin their path. Certainly, what I've found is that the traditional language and the structure of the path and the discussion of the goal and the process of transformation may very well be perfectly articulated in the traditional language if you understand the culture that it comes from. But if you don't, it can just sound extremely philosophical. It can sound like you're going to have to learn a lot more than just meditation to be able to take this on. We can all follow our breath and that kind of thing, but the path is not really about following the breath. The path is about understanding the roots of confusion and discovering the parts that are already within us, but not yet met, that can overcome that confusion.

Present-day teachers, myself, one of them, struggle or find the challenge of creating language that doesn't obscure or leave behind the tradition but finds a bridge so that modern people can get it. Then they can begin.

So there have been a lot of attempts and there will be a lot more attempts, and I'm sure that there are quite a few good ones. We have divided the path into two main parts of training, Finding Ground and Becoming Whole. These deal with the two main components of the path and the two main aspects of what we are as beings.

Important words that give us power

Tonight, I'm going to give the first talk in probably what will be three or four talks that talk about the main concepts, the main terminology that empower meditators. So just while I have that on my mind, I'm going to read you what these will be. We'll talk about probably all of them a little bit tonight, but I'll emphasize them in different talks.

In meditation, we use aspects of ourselves that are there, but probably we haven't discovered yet. We don't know how to call upon them for them to come in and do their work. So we have to have language that shows us how we will call upon those aspects, those aspects of our already awakened nature. So we have special versions of ordinary words. This is what has already happened in the West, like just the notion of enlightenment. Enlightenment is not a term that comes from Sanskrit or Tibetan, of course. Enlightenment is really associated with something that happened in European history. But we adopted it. And now people want to know about enlightenment. Enlightenment is maybe a good term, but it's also not the clearest term.

And then, of course, we have the particular word, which I think all meditators, all meditation teachers, we don't know what to do with because it's taken over. And that's mindfulness. Mindfulness has become something that is almost completely unrelated to the path of meditation. It's just become like a wellness routine or even something that sort of optimizes us for living a better life and has no deeper goal and can actually be quite resistant to the need for a deeper goal.

So what's one to do? Well, really the only choice is that you have to be bold. You have to determine what big concepts need to get through. And then you need to empower language that we already have. Otherwise, you're always throwing out Sanskrit terms like prajna and bodhi and samadhi and selwa — Tibetan terms too. And, you know, people can understand those in the space of a talk, but they don't really become useful when the talk is over and their memory drains. So a good approach is to carefully select words that we already have and then show how they have special meanings in the context of meditation.

Meditation words to explore

So the words that we're using are ordinary words. They are relaxation, simplicity, awareness, and clarity and intelligence.

We all know these five words, we use them all the time. But there are meditative meanings of these, which are not the same thing as even the most profound and interesting and compelling uses of those words in a non-meditation context. Even on their best day, the ordinary versions of these words do not mean their meditative counterpart.

So we have meditative relaxation, meditative simplicity, meditative awareness, meditative clarity, and meditative intelligence. And when we engage in actual genuine meditation, we begin to use these. And we find that we're using faculties that we've never used before. We may be using faculties that resemble their more mundane counterpart, but they give a non-mundane effect.

And when we have this under our belt, the light really comes on. We understand that this is an actual path to a transformed situation, which is, you know, if you just take the time to read about meditators and read about the history of meditation, you realize that this has always been about utterly transformed individuals in the millions, not just a few here and there. This is something that works. And it will work for us. We just have to know what to do, what the context of this journey is, and how to proceed in a daily way.

The path: overcoming amnesia

I'm just going to start out by saying that the purpose of the path is to overcome a situation that we're all in, that has arisen without us understanding how. The Buddhist teachings call this samsara. But we don't know what that word means usually. I mean, some of you all probably do know what that word means. But samsara really is experienced as a cycle of powerful suffering and confusion that is created by a state of amnesia. We don't know what we are. We don't even know that we don't know what we are. That's how bad the amnesia is. This amnesia begins when we are distracted from knowing what we are. And that's long past. We don't have a memory of when that happened. But it's perpetuated by wandering mind.

Wandering mind is a lot deeper than just not being able to, you know, stay on the page you're reading because you start thinking about tomorrow. Yeah, that's wandering mind. But there's a much deeper layer of wandering mind, which has created our identity. It's created the world that we live in. And it is basically made out of confusion. This confusion can be predicted somewhat. So we have things like science that can clarify this confusion to some extent. Super awesome that we have that. But that is never going to remove amnesia. In order to remove amnesia, we have to use something else. We have to use a method that goes right to the root of this amnesia.

So we could say the purpose of the path is to overcome amnesia and discover our actual identity beyond the storm of confusion.

Two traditional approaches to the path

And there are two approaches to this that work together. One of them is to start at the beginning and to train our mind and to train our lifestyle so that things become a little more clear. We become a little more confident. We give up things that hurt us and hurt others. We take on habits that benefit ourselves and others. And bit by bit, year by year, we become more wholesome people. We have a sense of stability and simplicity. We're out of some of the storm, but we have not overcome amnesia.

The gradual path of the mind

This is what's called the relative truth path. Like if you've heard of the Four Noble Truths, shamatha, mindfulness, compassion, revulsion for samsara. All of those are elements of this relative truth path. It's important. It's effective. It's gradual. We teach this in finding ground. The culmination of that path is that we enter into an experiential state called nowness. Nowness begins to see the world as it is. This world that we see is not the way we used to think it was. It's momentary. It is an expression of causes from the past and effects that we are not creating in this moment. We begin to see that, and it causes us to find the space to relax further.

When we are in the state of nowness, we are beginning to understand that we've missed something. We are on the brink of discovering what we are. Now that brink can either be a very long transitional period. If we stay on that path, we can use the methods that are called vipassana to try to see beneath the carpet or to pull back the curtain. It's a very gradual path that does begin to overcome amnesia. But when I say very gradual, I mean very gradual in a way that usually we don't even think of as a possibility.

The tradition will tell us that that path will lead to the overcoming of amnesia. But it will take thousands and thousands of lifetimes. Yeah. You know, that's great. It means that we're on the right path. But it does mean that this lifetime is not going to see the fruition of this path.

Now, if this is all that we had, this would still be a great thing. There are some insights that we can have. We can see through the illusion of personal self. We can experience egolessness. That's extremely powerful. But it's pretty shallow compared to the insights that come later. So the kind of prize at the end of that path is that we see what are called the three marks of existence: impermanence, the contamination of clinging to moments of mind, which is usually called dukkha or suffering—it’s called suffering, which isn't the best term—and then finally, we see the emptiness of self (or non-self). This is a considerable accomplishment, and is something we can do in one lifetime on that path.

The immediate path of awareness

The deeper transformations are harder to win, so to speak.

But there is a way that we can shorten that so that it is packed into this lifetime. And this derives from a series of practice discoveries or however scholars always debate about this. About 1,500 years ago or 1,800 years ago, a style of meditation came into vogue which used awareness rather than mind. These teachings were originally taught in the Buddha nature schools or the Mahayana.

See, again, this is where things get complicated and there's a lot of traditional terminology, but that's where they come from. And they resulted in what are now the two premier traditions of awareness practice, which are Mahamudra and Dzogchen. Mahamudra and Dzogchen are awareness-based traditions that go for the ultimate transformation in one lifetime. If it doesn't happen in one lifetime, it's fine. Maybe it happens in six lifetimes. But that's a much better situation than thousands and thousands of lifetimes.

And honestly, it isn’t thousands and thousands. Traditionally, it's said to be trillions of lifetimes if you just use the gradual path. So I don't think we have time for that, you know. I mean, I'm already getting on. I need to do as much as I can in the time that I have.

So luckily for all of us, we live in a world where the traditions of awareness have been co-mingled with the traditions of the mind. Now, the traditions of the mind are the mindfulness traditions that lead to nowness, the three marks of existence. They're taught excellently by the Theravadan teachers and traditions, and they're truly great. But they do have the limitations we just discussed.

We should understand that there are legacy traditions that only have those teachings. They have never mingled the teachings on mind with the teachings on awareness, even though they've had 1,500 years to do it. Then there are hybrid traditions where they may emphasize the teachings on the mind and the Four Noble Truths and seeing impermanence and seeing suffering and seeing non-self. But they also have a way of communicating awareness. A lot of the teachings that we probably encounter from the early schools, the mind-based schools, have started to mingle them. So there's some hope there.

How we should begin

But if you're starting out and if you're choosing a path, it's essential that you understand the breadth of what is on offer. My recommendation to everyone is just the recommendation that I was given. Understand the mind and the relative world, but practice from the perspective of awareness.

So that's what we do. Finding ground is the teaching that takes you all the way through understanding the body and the mind and the relative world and karma and impermanence and virtue and compassion and all that stuff. It's excellent. Anyone can start there. But I think that most of us are probably looking for something immediate, not gradual. There's nothing wrong with that. I mean, there are these paths that are immediate. They exist for a reason. It isn’t ambitious or obnoxious to want to begin that way.

The path of Becoming Whole through glimpses

These are paths that involve immediate experience in short moments. These are glimpsing practices: where we learn to glimpse a stage that is more simple and clear than our everyday state of mind. And we have stages of these. But glimpsing practice is a way of beginning to directly go after amnesia. It doesn’t change our outer life the way the gradual path does. We don’t become clearly more mindful. We don’t understand karma in the same intricacy as we would. We don’t develop a stable, continuous mind the way we would if we focused on shamatha and mindfulness and things like that. But all that stuff can be learned.

We’re going to the very root. We’re turning the light on. And as the light comes on, we begin to heal. And that healing has a powerful effect on our outlook. When we begin to heal, then we look at the teachings on mindfulness and karma and the gradual path, and we do that in our spare time. What we’re doing is we’re just choosing the fastest route into transformative practice. Because there’s transformative practice and preparatory practice. Awareness practice is transformative. Anything else is almost always preparatory.

Now, that’s not to say that there aren’t powerful experiences which happen in the preparatory path. But they aren’t actually transformative. And when we say transformative, that’s really what we mean. What you thought you were is no longer what you think you are. In fact, you don’t think you are anything, because you’re no longer living your life from thinking. You have transcended the mind, which is where thinking happens. You haven’t gotten rid of the mind. You still have a mind. You can still use the mind. But you’re not coming from the mind. You’re coming from awareness.

Glimpsing practice is available now

So, I thought it would be interesting to talk about glimpsing practice. Glimpsing practice is what we teach in our Becoming Whole retreats. And we do have one coming up in a couple of weeks, which I invite all of you to attend.

Glimpsing practice is a way for us to use the methods of awareness meditation to simply drop to the basis of what we are. We don’t have any logic for it. We don’t have any path to it. We just learn to do it. We have to have a little bit of knowledge to do it. Not a lot of knowledge, though. Mostly, we have to have courage to do something unexpected.

It takes courage to relax

And what that essentially means is that we learn to suddenly relax. When we suddenly relax, the wandering mind drops. And then amnesia begins to clarify a little. It doesn’t clarify enough for us to recover what we are. But we enter into an experience.

This is what the term simplicity refers to, a simple experience of what we are that isn’t caught in confusion. Simplicity is very important to a meditator. When we relax, we relax toward simplicity. So we have levels of simplicity that we will be able to touch based on how familiar we are with awareness.

We have all heard of the term nowness. And nowness is a very important term in awareness practice. And, you know, I think that awareness that nowness kind of came into the mainstream, like in 1999, with Eckhart Tolle. He wrote his book, The Power of Now. He used the term nowness a lot. And I listened quite a bit to what he was saying. April and I even went to see him and meet him right when his book was published. He has a deep meaning behind nowness. There’s definitely something there. But other people have begun to use the term nowness in an extremely mundane way.

What is nowness?

So we should understand that the word nowness—if we experience nowness, and of course we all can, we just have to do it and learn to do it—when we experience nowness, we are seeing something that we’ve never seen before. A part of us will never be fooled again. Nowness is a waking up process. It’s not an ordinary state of mind. The ordinary state of mind that’s usually referred to as nowness just means the kind of present moment. We still hold on to our identity. Maybe our thought activity is reduced. But we’re not thinking about the future. We’re not thinking about the past. We’re not confused in our thinking. We’re just sort of here.

That’s what usually is referred to when people say nowness. This is what I’ve observed on YouTube and places like that. That is not the nowness that we’re talking about. The word nowness in meditation terminology is just one click away from enlightenment. That’s how powerful it is. It’s often a translation of the term suchness or dekon yi or tathata, which these are all Sanskrit and Tibetan terms, which refer to the state of experience we have when we contact deeper and deeper layers of what we are. We come to a point where all confused identity is way out there in the foreground. We are just experiencing freedom from that. That’s a very powerful experience. And we’re doing it when we’re awake. We’re doing it with our eyes open. No ayahuasca has been used. No psilocybin necessary. It’s just natural. It’s the natural good stuff that is there for us if we learn how to have the courage to relax.

Relaxation is a powerful path of transformation. It’s not something that we do. It’s something that we allow. We allow it based on being more and more brave, not more and more anything else. We don’t relax because we’re afraid. We might not see it that way, but amnesia is a state of perpetual fear. We don’t know what we are, so we speed up to get away from anything that could show us what we are. We always go on to the next thing. Amnesia is a cycle, and it does not naturally let us go. But relaxation overpowers amnesia, and that’s incredible.

Glimpses of “here and nowness”

So the first step of relaxation is unlike the next steps of relaxation, because the first step of relaxation has to be abrupt. In our way of teaching, we call this dropping. We drop from the thinking mind, and we land in the feeling of our body, and a basic sense of awareness dawns. There’s no content to it. It’s not—we don’t, like, space out. We’re here. And so I call this a glimpse of here and nowness. Here and nowness. It’s the basic fundamental glimpse that we need to adjust to before we can go deeper.

The next glimpse that we’re going to have is called nowness. So first of all, it’s just we drop thinking into a basic simplicity of here and nowness. Now, here and nowness is something we’ve all had. We know this. We know that it’s not toxic. It’s not going to kill us. It’s something that we do have experience with, but we probably have not been encouraged to let it last. Here and nowness dissolves back into amnesia very quickly.

In the experience of just being here and now, we have a little sense of, wow, I feel free somehow, or I feel a possibility of being free. When I work with meditation students who are very new to awareness practice, they often will say, “This experience that I’m having, I had this when I was hiking once, and I came through a pathway to this cliff, and there was a rainbow, and my mind just dropped.” That’s here and nowness. We’ve experienced it. But what would happen if we could experience that in an ongoing way? Well, confusion would thin out. Anxiety would thin out. But most important of all, we will begin to notice that there’s like a big space behind us. Wow. Wow. How do we get into that big space? We relax. We relax into that bigger space of nowness proper.

Nowness: the dawn of meditative intelligence

Nowness is where we begin to see the illusions of the thinking mind. In particular, we see time. We see that our awareness is not in time. Our mind, our thinking mind, is in time. But awareness sees time. It isn’t in time. That’s a great reason to call this nowness. That’s one of the real just trophy words that translators stumbled upon. We actually have that word, and it’s just ready for profundity.

Nowness is the dawn of meditative intelligence. Here and nowness is a sense of freedom, but it doesn’t have intelligence yet. It’s not settled enough for intelligence to dawn. When intelligence dawns, we begin to see what it was that has caught us throughout our life. Here and nowness doesn’t see that. It just sort of sees that, “Wow, there’s a moment of, oh my God, I feel so safe. I feel so, ah, so right.” It doesn’t last long, though, because it doesn’t have power. Nowness has the power of meditative intelligence.

On a path, we are able to identify that basic here and nowness. Then we learn how, within that, to go one step deeper into nowness proper and to let meditative intelligence rise up and keep us there. Now, as we hold meditative intelligence—and the word for that, for those of you who wonder, is prajna, meditative intelligence, prajna—that’s the intelligence that sees the nature of things. That’s the intelligence that doesn’t just solve a complicated math problem. That’s one that overcomes ignorance. It begins to overcome amnesia. Nowness is the product of a more profound relaxation.

Courage becomes bravery

We have taken the courage that we needed at the first part of our journey to drop and land in here and nowness. And it’s become something that is like a skill that we have. We no longer need the same courage. Now we have courage as a habit, and so we call that bravery. Now we’re in nowness and we’re just brave. We’re facing the powerful attempts in every moment to pull us back into time, but we hold that power of intelligence and we don’t let it pull us. And

what does this do? This does something amazing. This settles us completely. We begin to notice there’s even a bigger space back there.

Well, that bigger space is very important because that’s the threshold between mind and awareness. All we need is to relax and settle more and more. Then we land in awareness. Awareness is free from amnesia. That’s true meditative simplicity. That’s true meditative intelligence. That is transformation. The only thing we need to do is to learn how to relax. The only way that we’re going to learn how to relax is to do it in little sessions.

Glimpsing practice: three layers

This is called different things by different awareness teachers. I call it—and I’m probably not going to call it this forever because it sounds almost like a productivity hack—but I call it short form glimpsing practice. Short form glimpsing practice is us starting in our ordinary state of mind. And when we remember, “Oh, I’m on this path,” you just drop and relax.

There are three layers you can drop into, each more deeper than the previous one.

You land either in here and nowness, or you land in nowness, or you land in the deepest layer, which I call luminosity.

Depending on what you’ve done before in your path, how well trained you are, you might relax from an ordinary state of mind and go all the way down into luminosity and overcome amnesia. It’s possible. How long does that take? [snaps fingers] That long. But it takes thousands and thousands and thousands of those before that really becomes an experience.

Transformative practice

I just want to encourage people to understand that the really transformative type of meditation doesn’t involve following the breath and becoming more mindful. That’s all good to do. But that’s not going to transform us. That’s going to protect us so that we can also do the transformative path.

I was told to begin relaxation and awareness, I resisted.

When I was starting out, I really wanted to do the mindfulness, the stability, the relative world stuff, because you could measure it. Like, you know, your samadhi or your meditative absorption could be measured. You would know if you’re at stage three or stage four or at stage five. It was cool. It felt like I was gaining something. My teachers all—sometimes they would say, “That’s good that you’re doing that. That’s good.” I never understood why they weren’t a little more appreciative of all of my hard work. But they all told me, “That’s good, but that’s not going to do it. It’s not going to help you. You need to just relax. It’s what you need to do.”

For 10 or 20 years, I did not understand what they meant when they said relax. I thought they meant I shouldn’t work so hard at the stuff I’m doing. I should have a more relaxed approach to developing mindfulness and stability and vipassana. And that didn’t make sense because those things, those require effort. It would be like going into a gym and lifting heavy weights and someone coming up and saying, “That’s good, but you should use lighter weights.” That doesn’t make any sense. You know, you’re trying to get swole and they’re telling you to take your weight down. Well, they didn’t mean that. I just didn’t understand what they meant.

They were telling me that that path that I was on was a very good path. It’s a lot better than just sex, drugs, and rock and roll. But it’s not the transformative path. It’s not what makes a Buddha a Buddha. When they were telling me to relax, they were telling me to switch on to the path of awareness. I probably could have heard, but I was very wrapped up in my accomplishments that were happening on that other path.

But I’ll tell you, when I finally—and it really took a one-on-one meeting with a teacher that I really love and trust, where he just laughingly said, “You just got to stop it. Just stop everything you’re doing. Seriously. You think you’re going to live forever? Just stop and drop and be.” And he meant, you know, enter this path of awareness. And this is the first time I really heard it. And so I did. And it totally changed my practice.

You know, I’m in my, probably my 30th year of practice now. And although I don’t regret the 15 or 20 years of doing all that other practice, I can’t believe that I was getting the advice almost from the very beginning to switch into awareness. I just couldn’t believe it. And so I didn’t hear it. And God, I mean, I’m glad I heard it when I did because I’m never going back.

Short form glimpsing practice is convenient

But anyway, short form glimpsing practice is something you can punctuate your day with. It’s something that you can learn to do anytime you remember. And it really only takes a minute, because for you to relax completely for longer than a minute is unlikely. Even the great teachers will tell you, you know, 10 seconds, 15 seconds. I mean, if it’s a minute, that’s great. You’ve really been working hard. But those little glimpses, those 10 seconds are like a lifetime of practice. What if you do it 50 times a day?

Mingyur Rinpoche, who’s—I’m sure most of you know who he is—he’s this fantastic, wonderful, very young, legitimate meditation master who’s alive and well. He used to carry one of these things around, a little clicker. And he would count how many glimpses he had each day. I don’t know how many he would do. He didn’t divulge. But some time ago, I got one. And I started doing it. And it’s made a huge difference.

So in the Becoming Whole retreat that we’re getting ready to have, I’m going to teach you the merits of having a clicker. And we’re going to learn the sudden glimpsing practice. We’re going to learn how to drop into here and nowness. Then later on the first day, we’re going to drop into nowness. And then for those who have the courage, on Sunday, we’re going to drop into luminosity. And you’re going to learn how to put these profound experiences into the minutes of your day. They will make a difference. This is how the masters have been doing it all this time.

Short sessions, repeated thorughout the day

It isn’t long, uninterrupted sessions. It might be long sessions, but it’s long sessions of short moments. That’s the secret formula. That only works in awareness practice. That doesn’t work in mindfulness practice. Mindfulness practice is about reaching out, grabbing it, and holding it, and not being thrown. 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 40 minutes, whatever you can do. And you can do 40 minutes. You can do 90 minutes. You can do hours. But it takes work. It doesn’t transform you. And as soon as you let up on your discipline, it dissolves. Take it from one who’s been there.

Upcoming Retreat: Becoming Whole Home Retreat

So, Becoming Whole Home Retreat. We do four sessions. One Saturday morning. One Saturday afternoon. Each session is a continuation of the training. Then Sunday, two sessions. One in the morning and one in the afternoon. And we go through all of these glimpsing practices. It’s a powerful training in relaxation, and it’s been very popular with people who’ve done it. They seem to have loved it.

So if you’re interested in such a thing, there’s one just right around the bend.

Thank you.