High Altitude Meditation Retreat Preview with Delson Armstrong and Doug Kraft -podcast

Great, yeah, this looks like a great website, twim.network. I think we can get started now, and I'll just give you guys a little bit of the structure of how we're going to do this. Let me just get into spotlight mode. I think this should be good. Maybe I should... is this pinned anyway? Hopefully this works. I just wanted to explain to you how this is going to go down. We wanted to basically do a special sort of conversation today between myself and Doug Kraft. Most of you know who Doug is, and he's a guy who needs no introduction. He's done many, many, many, many retreats.

He's guided many people. And in fact, his book, Buddha's Map, was the first book that I read that discussed the jhanas. And it was my first entry point into understanding what the jhanas are. And he wrote it in such a way that he talked about his own experiences, which made it very easy to understand and ultimately apply. I actually read his book prior to doing my online retreat with David Johnson back in 2000.

I want to say 2016, probably. It's been a long time. But this conversation is to help everyone understand what we're doing together. We're basically collaborating together on a retreat, which is about a seven or eight day retreat, primarily based on Doug's newest book, High Altitude Meditation. And I was inspired to do something a little different than the usual TWIM retreat, which some of you attended, my retreat late last year in October in regards to the Gates of Liberation.

And so this is an expansion on that, and when we talk about the Gates of Liberation, you know, we're talking about the signless awareness of mind, the undirected awareness of mind, and the emptiness awareness of mind. We'll get into what all that means. But I figured, while I was there in California, I had a chance to meet with Doug, and we had been contemplating for a couple of years now on collaborating together, and finally it's come about in this event. So this is meant to be for people who want to explore how you can access nibbana, whether we call it mundane nibbana or super mundane nibbana or whatever, in daily life and in practice, and how you can actually

not only access but apply it to everything that you're doing. There are references to how this happens in the suttas, and I might get into a little bit of that, but that's what we're going to do. We're going to talk about that. I think I'll hand it over to Doug to first talk about himself and his new book and what he wants to explore with you guys and a little bit about the retreat. Doug, over to you. Thank you, thank you. One thing that you all will learn about me pretty quickly is that I have a very soft voice. So if you want to turn up the volume control, just stick your hand up a little bit, because I like people to hear me, but it gets so intimate for me, I just get soft and drift off into the akash. So please help keep my volume control up. I'm not offended by it at all. Well, the title of the book, High Altitude Meditation, my experience with this practice is that the deeper and further it goes

the simpler and more obvious it is, which is, you know, it's kind of a paradox. But we start off trying to figure out all these sort of weird things, and how this works, and how the jhanas work, and you go, this there, and you know, turn this one up a little bit, or something like that. And as you go along, you realize, oh, wait a minute, wait a minute, what's the fuss about? It's just really simple. But we may get into it. One of the last chapters in the book was started off as an exercise. In the chapter before it, it was called Almost Nothing, which was referring to that space just before you go into nibbana, just before you go out, where there's nothing there but there's a little bit. So there's almost nothing you open up to. But what this little exercise was, was to try to see what this awareness is really about, clear awareness.

If you think about it, because all of you, I'm sure I've had lots of different experiences with clear awareness. And so I just started making a list of qualities. I thought I'd have three or four or something like that, and I ended up with, I don't know, 20 or 30. So that might be an interesting exercise for us, if we feel like doing that. It's just sort of going around and people using a different language you use for describing clear awareness.

But I thought maybe to give you a more interesting story. This is not my writing. This is from Kim Boykin, and she calls it Meditation Hints from the Colorado Division of Wildlife. And she writes: My husband and I spent last summer at my family cabin in Grand Lake, Colorado, at the edge of the Rocky Mountain National Park. In town one day I picked up a pamphlet on living in bear country, and the suggestions for what to do if you meet a bear sounded a lot like meditation instructions.

So, substituting thought for bear, here are some helpful hints from the Colorado Division of Wildlife. Colorado has been the home to thoughts since the earliest ancestors evolved in North America. Today, increasing numbers of people routinely live and play in thought country. Learning about thoughts and being aware of their habits will help you fully appreciate these unique animals and the habitat in which they live.

What to do if you meet a thought? There are no definite rules about what you do if you meet a thought. Thought attacks are rare compared to the number of close encounters. However, if you do meet a thought, before it has time to leave an area, here are some suggestions. Remember, every situation is different with respect to the thought, the terrain, the people, and their activity.

So, stay calm. If you see a thought and it hasn't seen you, calmly leave the area. Stop. Back away slowly while facing the thought. Give the thought plenty of room to escape. Wild thoughts rarely attack people unless they feel threatened or provoked. Speak softly. This may reassure the thought that no harm is meant to it. If a thought stands upright or moves closer and may be trying to detect smells in the air, it isn't a sign of aggression.

Once a thought identifies you, it may leave the area or try to intimidate you by charging it within a few feet before it withdraws. Very important to remember these. Don't run or make any sudden movements. Running is likely to prompt the thought to give chase, and you can't outrun a thought. If you have a potentially life-threatening situation with a thought, or if an injury occurs, please contact the Division of Wildlife Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Share this with a friend or neighbor. That's great. Yeah, yeah. I think, Delson, in my sense of this, when I'm leading retreats, and I know Delson is doing this more and more, it's actually, I don't say we come in blank mind, but we come in with relatively little overt intentions. What I'm really most interested in is hearing what's going on for other people and hearing their responses to stuff, and that always turns into a richer conversation than anything I could have constructed beforehand.

So as we go along, and even starting right now, if you have any questions or concerns, or something you've been tickling your fancy or worried about, or whatever the case, this is one chance to stick your hand up or just start talking. And if nobody says anything, then we'll sit here for a long time in quiet. Well, I think if nobody has anything to say, maybe I'll just pivot a little bit and ask you, Doug, what was the inspiration for the book? Why did you write it? What was the whole premise behind it?

Well, yeah, it's got a long premise. Let me see if I can do this quickly. As some of you know, I'm an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister. The first church I served out of seminary was in this little town in New England, out in the country, called Ashby. And it was an old church. I found the church on a map of the town that was drawn in 1700.

It had been around there a long time. And we had a lot of political progressives there, and who knew a lot of people. Daniel Ellsberg spoke at my church. They were all these people that were coming in. And at one point somebody said, you ought to get a spiritual heavy end. We got all these political people. You need to get a spiritual heavy end. And I said, well, who would you want? And he said, well, how about Ram Dass? Well, I knew who Ram Dass was from his book and stuff like that, but that was about all. And I knew his father lived up in central New Hampshire. This was in northern Massachusetts.

So I wrote to him and invited him to come, and I was just blown away. I got a note back and said he was going into a retreat, but after he comes out, he'd be glad to come down. This old church had a seating capacity of about 250. And when I was there at a very heavily attended church, like maybe Easter or Sunday or something like that, we might get 15 people.

It was a very small church. And when Ram Dass came, I met him at my house, and we drove down to the church together. And I walked in, and I swear to God, there must have been 250 people in there. Many of them had driven up from New York City. And the first thing I did was look around, because I knew how old the building was. I thought, there has not been this much weight in the building for over 200 years, probably.

Well, it held together. And Rondas was the first person I met who seemed like he may know something about something. And I didn't feel like I knew anybody who knew anything about anything. And he seemed to think that meditation was important for some reason or other. I know, so I asked him. I said, where can I get some meditation training? And he said, well, up here in Massachusetts we just have an embarrassment of riches, but if you want a place to meditate, there's a new place that just opened up in Western Mass. It's called... no, Spirit Rock is one that's out here. Oh, you all know the name of it." - "IMS." - "IMS, Insight Meditation Society, yes."

One of my unrequested gifts that has drifted into me lately is I'm getting into that age where there are things that just fade out a lot, you know? Rondas was the first one that taught me about it, 'cause he just had a stroke. And he said, "You know, I've been trying to get my mind to go blank all my life. Now it goes blank all the time." And he said, so if I go blank, we're just going to meditate until my mind comes back.

And he was so relaxed about it. It was just, it was just kind of a wonderful thing. But anyway, so I went out to IMS and Ruth Denison was my first teacher, and we have personalities that match like, I don't know, not very much at all. I spent most of that retreat arranging pillows and cushions and trying to figure out how to get through the next 10 minutes. But what I left with, I felt like it was the most wonderful thing I'd done in my whole life. Was this a two-week retreat? And I was glad that I never have to do it again.

But I went back the next year and the next year and the next year and the next year, and I've done one or two retreats a year now for, I don't know, what it's been, 60, 70 years, something like that. And after a couple years, John Travis was my main teacher at that point, and I started going into jhanas. I didn't know quite what they were, and I asked him about jhanas, and he described a little bit. He said, if you really want to learn about the jhanas, I know this monk, and you ought to go meet him and train with him.

And his name was Bhante Vimalaramsi. So I called him and I went out to Dhammasukha. And when I left Dhammasukha, again, I felt like it had been probably the most wonderful thing I'd done my whole life. But Bhante didn't describe it very well, at least nothing that I could understand. And I gradually picked it up a little bit. And then sitting in the bus station, leaving Ohio to go back home, I thought, well, I know how to write. And so I started outlining this book.

And I called it How to Meditate, or something stupid like that. I don't remember what my original title was, except that it was pretty dull. And then when it was written and it was almost ready to be published, I still didn't have a good title for it. And then it just dawned on me: Buddha's Map. That's what we were really talking about. It wasn't even walking it. It was like laying out what the map is, and we all have to learn it in our own way, etc., etc., and that became the book, that became the book.

That was a long answer, wasn't it? Yeah. And then how did you get to high altitude meditation? So I went to retreat after retreat, I did some in Thailand and some all over the place, and what gradually became clear to me is that the more you understood about this stuff, the simpler it was. It seems really complicated in the beginning. So I was trying to find a really simple book that wasn't too pretentious, and I didn't want to call it How to Walk the Buddhist Path or something like that. We've got many, many variations on that. But what I felt like it really did is it just sort of laid out what the territory is, and it was your job to figure out how to travel it. So I ended up calling it The Buddha's Map, and my publisher thought that was just great, so I could stop looking for a title. Yeah, yeah. But I'm talking about now, when we're doing this retreat, High Altitude Meditation.

Where did that come from? How did that arise? Yeah, well, as you asked that question, you have the swordfish coming out of your head. No, it's okay, he's friendly. Well, he looks kind of joyous in a sort of stiff way. He's an ex, he's an ecstasy. Yes. Yeah, first and second jhana. Yeah, yeah. So where the high altitude came from, I haven't done a lot of hiking, but I have done a fair amount up at high altitude here in California. There was a time when I would go up Mount Round Top, which is over a thousand feet, at least two or three times a year. And what I noticed over and over, and I talked with John Travis about it, he said the things really change at high altitude. They're a lot simpler. And he said, yeah, that's really true. And it felt like the simplicity of the practice

everybody wanted to count jhanas and do all this juggling and all this sort of stuff to make it feel important, but really, what's most important about it is just simple. And towards the end of the book, I think it's one of the last chapters in there. There's almost nothing second to last, which is just before the going into nibbana. And just before that, there was a chapter that I wrote on clear awareness.

And it was an interesting exercise because you ask, what's clear awareness? Well, we all know what that is, but you've got to try to describe what it is, and it's not so easy. So I sat down with this and I decided to write down all the things that you could say about clear awareness. And that book, I don't know, it's got about 20 different things. And that was just the beginning. That was just the beginning. So that was a way of sort of laying out some of the things that you're dealing with. It might even be a fun exercise to go through this together and just hear all your contributions to what clear awareness might be.

But, well, maybe I'm not going to find a chapter now. I will get embarrassed real quickly here. Take your time, it's all good. Yeah, thank you. That's good instructions to give. Yeah, that's good meditation instructions. Take your time. Okay, those are the first instructions. I was determined to do this. I wrote this down someplace where it was. Doug, I'll take the opportunity while you're checking that out to just let everybody know I'm sending everybody a link to the High Altitude Meditation retreat that you and Delson will be leading in California beginning July 31st. It's a seven-day retreat, and there's open registration, guys. So if you want to learn more about it, learn more about Doug and what they're up to at that retreat.

It's pretty much there. It's going to be different than a normal, regular TWIM retreat, more along the lines of the Gates of Liberation, but there'll be something on karma and causality, the nature of subjective experiences, nirvana as an objective, and a bunch of other stuff. So check out the website when you have time. So, Doug, did I deliver a good enough distraction, enough cover? Well, these pages keep sticking together, so, well, I'm going to have to just give up on this. But so it would be interesting, just even to call out what some of the qualities are of clear awareness. Just anybody want to chime in at this point and talk about their understanding of clear awareness?

Don't be shy. You won't be on camera. It's okay. I could help but benefit greatly by your instructions at the Gates of Liberation retreat. When you said, don't do anything, just rest your mind. Don't do anything, just rest in your awareness. And that has come to be so instructional and so much about what this retreat is about that I just wanted to share that. And thank you, Delson, for that. That has really been, you know, like I've been trying hard my whole life. This was real liberation. - Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I think we need shirts that say don't do anything, the t-shirts that say don't do anything, because that is, that's really my final instruction to people when they get to those high altitude states, you know. I mean, what happens is, initially, as a practitioner, we're all sort of hell-bent towards Nibbana, and we're doing everything we can to let go of the hindrances, to experience the jhanas, experience great joy, and some people feel underwhelmed by that, and that's fine, because they have built in their mind an expectation that when they say, joy and ecstasy it's as good as the swordfish behind me who seems to be having an orgasm so you know it's it's not necessarily having to be that joyful it's just that your mind feels uh quite alert quite joyful in the sense of uplifted and uh and you start to experience greater degrees of equanimity i've always said to people that bliss is overrated because when you have deep equanimity uh that is the container for all other states

and equanimity really is a great great sort of baseline mindset to have when you're dealing with the world at large especially now with the world that we're dealing with and and eventually you get to this place in the formless attainments as you get into infinite space infinite consciousness nothingness and neither perception or non-perception especially in that area things get a little fuzzy things get a little like uh hypnagogic and uh it's really about navigating it by doing less you know at this point less is more and what's happening there is the mind becomes very very subtle so any kind of movement that you do has great degrees of effect on it so people will say you know when you're feeling lethargic in your mind you bring a little bit of joy but people make too much of an effort and that just wobbles everything in the mind it's small steps very small incremental steps at that point and this this sense of clear awareness as i have understood it and from the experiences of many participants who've attended the retreats uh it's it's

It's a place in which your mind is quiet for the most part. There are maybe fuzzy things here and there, but your mind is primarily very quiet, primarily very still, relatively still. And then you fall into this place, or you can fall into this place, which in the sutta is known as the signless, because this is what I call objectless awareness, where the mind is now in a place where it's not taking anything as an object: neither itself, nor something outside of itself, nor something inside of itself. It's just undirected. That's another word for it: appanihita, where there's no direction given to where it wants to go, and it just rests in itself. That's where you don't do anything. And there's no real clarified sense of self. It's just a process that you see going on, and eventually all that leads towards nibbana. It's the final three, let's say, steps, and this is why I've called them the gates of liberation, and that's why they're known also traditionally as the gates of liberation.

When you get to the objectless awareness of mind, it's a place in which you realize that all objects are ultimately impermanent, including jhanas, including joy and loving kindness and equanimity. All of these things are objects which are ultimately conditioned and therefore subject to change. And if they're subject to change, then why hold on to anything at all? Now, you can try doing this in the beginning, but you will falter as a practitioner for the most part, because the mind always needs something to rest on until it feels stable enough to let go. And this is the general rule of thumb. But coming back to this objectless awareness...

In this space the mind realizes that no objects are ultimately permanent, and so it just lets go completely of that. And it also sees that every intention that it makes ultimately leads to a conditioned state, which can ultimately lead to the demise or decay or destruction of that conditioned state, no matter how wonderful it feels. And so ultimately it is suffering, it is dukkha. And so one lets go of all intention at that point, and then there is no controller here. It will happen when it happens. I've always said this, and this instruction, if you clearly understand this, if you see this in the practical sense, that when you least expect it, it happens, that in itself is the instruction. When you least expect it means stop expecting anything. Let go of all expectations. Let go of all conceptualization. Let go of all idealization.

Of what it should be, or how it should be, or what will be. Will it be a brilliant white light that comes up? Will it be a lot of joy? Will it be like the devas coming out from the heavens and trumpeting your name and saying, congratulations, here you are, now as a stream-enter? No, it's not any of that. So when you let go of expectations, you let go of any sense of control of the process, and that's the emptiness. That's the sunyata, you know, that's the place in which the mind lets go of all conceptual thought and proliferation of conceptualization.

And when that happens, because all those layers of samskaras, of sankaras, of formations are starting to just go dormant and starting to fade away, your mind just drops on its own. It's like you can't force the ripening of the fruit on a tree. It will drop when it needs to drop. And that dropping itself is known as moksha, muchyate, as it's known in Sanskrit, or vimukti, or vimutti in Pali.

Or vimuchyate, as it's known sometimes in Sanskrit. The vimukti or vimutti is when it will happen. And you've done the work, let's say. You've done the preliminary work, but now, once you get into these spaces, there's no more work to be done. There's no more outward looking, no more inward looking. There's just a space in which you are fully self-satisfied, so to speak. In that space you're just, this is what it is, and I will hang out here. And you don't even think you're hanging out there. It's just the mind continues to taper off bit by bit by bit by bit until nothing is left, and the mind just ceases.

So in my intentions for this retreat, that's what I want to guide everybody in, whoever is attending, is to look at those spaces and be at home with those spaces. The irony is we all want to meditate so we stop getting into states of thought, and a place where the mind is silent. More often than not, what happens is people get into that space and then they get agitated. They're like, what's next? They feel uncomfortable with that clear awareness. Sometimes they feel uncomfortable with that quietness. In fact, they feel like they need to do more, or something needs to be done. And that's all arising from the mind that doesn't feel satisfied at all. That feels unsettled. And that's the irony. We all meditate to quiet down the mind, but as soon as we get that mind that's quiet, we're not comfortable in it. So for my intentions, I want to make you comfortable in that. And I want you to be at home with it and understand

The different layers of it as they've been described in Doug's book, and as we will guide you through it. The idea for the structure of the retreat is, of course, there will be talks between me and Doug, and there will also be interviews. It will be an interview between yourself and the two of us. Doug and I will both be there to interview you, so that we can both give our perspectives in the same interview, and hopefully they're helpful. And that's the idea.

I'll stop there because there's more stuff I want to say, but I'll just see because I see somebody's raised their hand. Yeah, Alex, go ahead. Your microphone's off. I think it's, uh, can you hear me? No, I can. Okay. All right. When you were talking about this, I was wondering if you could develop a little bit more on an instruction you gave me about letting go the tension over the edges.

There's all kinds of ways to manipulate those. And what happens oftentimes when you get closer to stuff or start moving into it, you see, oh, I'm losing it, and there's this little place back there that sort of grabs it a little bit, as opposed to just letting go and surrendering into nothing. And as you let go and surrender into nothing, something else sticks its head up. Something else sticks its head up. And so it becomes this sort of game of whatever comes to mind

is not what this is about, right? And I used to call it, I don't know what's first things, you know, divine futility. It's like when you really get it that it's really futile to do all this stuff, that's the point at which the mind kind of lets go, because it's given up its path. And of course what will happen is that'll open up and it'll be wonderful, and you think, oh, I've done this wonderful thing, let me do it again. And so you'll be just cycling through that a lot. Just know that the purer your futility is

the freer the mind becomes. It's certainly opposite of what we have, what we expect. Yeah, yeah. I'm always really excited when people come in, they've got a new thing they're stumbling over. Yeah, okay, now we've got something else to let go of. Now we've got something else to let go of. Yeah, no, that's great. That's great, Doug. And just to give more instruction to Alex based on his question, I would say, that's just another way of letting go, as Doug was pointing out. Whatever you see that you think is there, it's not. It's just another play of the mind. It's just another thing where it's like, oh, there's a deeper level. No, it's just a concept in the mind. And so you let go of that. You keep letting go of that. So for the instructions of letting go of the borders of the mind when you're in quiet mind, to enter into signless, what that is is essentially letting go of any further conceptual tensions that there might be.

Letting go of, and it's ironic, because you're using a concept so that your mind can understand it, so that it can let go. Yeah. And at that time it's so easy, as you said, to overdo. I mean, it's so subtle that any doing is way out. Yeah. It's way too much. And if you can just accept that you're going to do way too much, then when it starts getting to be too much, catch it earlier and earlier and earlier and say, ah, okay, we've been there, we've been there. Yeah. So, Doug, did you find? Yeah, I agree with Jordan that the best instruction I also got from Delson was just do nothing

But I don't know whether other people have felt a kind of a cycle. There is a time when you're through a retreat when your mind really goes into that state, and then when you come out of that retreat situation and you're in your daily life, well, it becomes more difficult to get back into that state unless you go back to two or three or four hours of continuous meditation every day. So it's a kind of a cycle, and I don't know if anybody else experiences that, but

It's a rising and a falling, and it looks like a cycle, but what happens is mine gets a little quieter. It takes a little bit less to catch it and throw it off, and so you get caught and throw it off and say, okay, I gotta go back and do that again. No, no, that means you just kind of keep on going, as Delson was saying, just relax into it. You just let it be. Oh, but I can't let, you know, and you'll find all this little static that comes up in the back of the mind, sort of these quiet voices that aren't quite as loud, but they feed into it, and so when you get quiet and it seems to go off the track

Celebrate that. It's like, oh okay, we've got a route to go in deeper. That's all it is. Just relax further, just relax further. And what I'll say is, with regards to the so-called cycle that happens, there is also an understanding, or there should be, a pointing out of the fact that when we're on retreat, it seems like all the parameters are there. We've let go of the outside world and we're experiencing all of these things. But exactly who has let go of it? That's a brilliant question, because that then gives you perspective on what about the outside world? What is the outside world? It's just another kind of concept you have in the mind: that you're on retreat, and that you're off retreat. And when you're off retreat, you have to apparently deal with a lot of different things, like meetings and belligerent people and heartbreak and loss and lots of different fluctuations of the heart and the mind.

But if you were to look at this clear awareness, this space, and even nibbana, in everyday life (which I'm going to get to now) as a refuge that you can go to, as a sort of substrate that the mind can rest into and act from, if you start your day from there, if you start your practice from there, then it makes things much easier. It makes things much more digestible. Let's say the other thing I would say about this is, when we talk about nibbana, what is nibbana? There are about 32 names for nibbana, and it all points to many different things from different angles. Nibbana is seen as that which is the refuge, the shelter, the other shore, the beyond, the auspicious.

The resting place, closer than the self. That's a very interesting one, right? It's closer than the self. What does that even mean? It means that you let go of the self, and what's remaining is nibbana. The nibbana dhatu is this indestructible element that's always there, because it's not dependent upon the links of dependent origination. It's outside the purview of dependent origination. This is the thing that I want to explore and investigate in our retreat together. We have references to this in the suttas, the 32 names of nibbana, but also in Anguttara Nikaya 10.6 and 10.7, if I'm not mistaken. There you have Ananda speaking to the Buddha, and Sariputta, and they're both referring to the space in which it's beyond this world and the other. It's beyond all concepts, basically, and it's a space in which the mind becomes completely free of all duality.

So, if you go to the Keivara Sutta in Diga Nikaya, there it talks about, you know, the Anidasanam Vinyanam, which is, he says, neither earth water fire air are established in it where neither darkness or light are present and it's a space in which all conceptual consciousness ceases and what's remaining is this non-manifestative or non-reflective awareness and it is accessible here and now and it's as simple really it sounds very you know like are you really sure about that but it is true it sounds very simple but it is so profound if you just relax into it you will experience it yeah yeah and if i can give you uh you know a bunch of different words for that which is uh erica found the chapter in my book so i'll i'll just lead i'll just uh run through these uh and they uh hit a different the non-intellectual part of the mind um and uh like i say this chapter is called almost nothing so this is when you're getting close to nothing um fading of thought

I mean, you're not doing a thought. A thought just starts to fade. There's a sensation of dropping. Sometimes it's like you can feel the gravity more. The loss of a protagonist in your stories, the loss of the feeling of solidity. Non-dual awareness. Non-dual is when you have logically conflicting thoughts coexisting at the same time, perfectly well. This is what I noticed as a kid, a tingliness, just a little sort of... as a kid we used to call it crickles. There's this tingliness on the skin, which actually, physiologically, is dopamine that's being released as the body gets deeply relaxed. You can feel that. The content of your thought fades into just the processes.

No thing. We say nothing, but I think it's a mistranslation. There's no thing, there's not a thing left. Processes fade to qualities of awareness. Qualities fade into a field of awareness, rather than many qualities. There's just the field. Quiet smiles rise, sort of spontaneously, just in the background there. You see it on Delson all the time.

Chuckles and sighs. You may be sitting there meditating and this chuckle will just come up out of nowhere. It's a release of tension. Body postures tend to self-correct. Maybe not into something official, but you'll feel your body, and it'll just kind of move away. Soft eyes. Receptive rather than active. So a lot of times, when we're looking at things, sort of actively looking out, the mind becomes very passive and it's just receiving. Animata. Do people know what animata is? There's a place in the center of the eye where the optic nerves come in, and there are just more optic nerves there, and we just sort of blank that all out. But as the mind really, really quiets, you begin to notice that there's, it's almost like, a glowing spot at the center of the eyes. Nobody will probably get all of these things, but

you may get others of your own. It's one here I call of course, which is what you see as you're going along trying to work something out, and all of a sudden: of course, of course, of course. I don't know where it came from. It's just relaxing into, or spreading out. That's why it's so hard to get a hold of these things, because you're always sort of grabbing them. But it's just the kind of release of everything: emptiness of time and space, blank spots.

It's come along, there's a blending spot, it's silenced, and you won't even notice it because there's nothing there. But if the mind is really soft and receptive, you'll see it, and then it fills in. Well, that's enough. Anybody have anything to add to that? Louisa Wood Ruby says, don't just do something, sit there. Yeah, that's really great. Doug, when you're reading through that, because as you were reading through it, it's so interesting. Your mind, at least for me, your mind just gets...

Yeah, it just goes away. The mind just goes away. It starts to resonate with that place, and then the resonance just disperses. Yeah, yeah. So this is the stuff we will explore. I know there were a couple of people who wanted to ask a question. I know Ann had her hand raised, and if she still has something to say... Well, you think about what's the barrier, because it sounds from what you say, Delson, that Nibbana is like the real thing that's right there. It's right there. But it comes to me a lot from my own experience, and the little bit of guiding I've done, that you can't underestimate

expectation as a barrier, and it isn't just one flavour. I think of all the cultural aspects of that. You work hard to succeed, right? That's where 'strive on with diligence' really had an impact on me for many years, that 'strive on with diligence', and so 'don't do anything'. I remember the first time I'd be hard to do... yeah, the first time of that, either perception or non-perception. I didn't know what was going on, and I thought, but I should do something. I mean, it was a should. I didn't know any better. And then I guess it was Sil who said, oh, you don't have- - What you do there, Anne, is when the should comes up,

you let the should be the object, and then just let it go, and just let it go. You don't have to find a thing to put into the should. You just let the should. - Well, that's where I learned that, that first time, but I didn't realise I needed permission to not do anything. You know, I needed permission to know, because I was culturally trained to act. Yes. And so you can feel that cultural training. It goes in like that, to not project it out there, to be something. That's not it. It's something, what a relief. Oh, I don't have to rest on the rest here.

Yeah, yeah. I would just say that's a good point that you bring up. And with regards to expectations, I've spoken about this before, where this really great thinker and psychiatrist, Dr Albert Ellis, talked about three kinds of expectations: the expectations we have of ourselves, the expectations that we have of our close loved ones, and the expectations that we have of the world at large. And therein lies the suffering, because we expect ourselves to be a certain way in the practice, or we have a certain expectation of how the meditation should be going. And of course you just mentioned, very interestingly enough, the Buddha's final instructions to everyone, which was 'strive on with diligence'. I think if you contextualise that to what he's really referring to, and this is just my own perspective on it, the way I look at it is he says, all conditioned things are impermanent.

And it's interesting, if you look at the original Pali, it says that all sankhata, sankhata meaning all conditioned things, all things that are created, all things that are conceptualised, are impermanent. So he's giving a pointing out there. He's saying strive on and be diligent, and strive on in this case would be: be aware of that, be diligent. That part. The appamada, or pamada, which is, I think, pamada is the diligence, or being aware, and appamada is non-diligence, or the lack of diligence, the negligence to be aware of what's going on. So to have that awareness, that mindfulness, that sati, sampajanna, that clear comprehension. Here comes a point where formation is coming up, and the moment I identify with it and take it personally, I'm making an unnecessary effort to do something with it. So the real striving on there is to see it for what it is.

and to let go, there's that disconnect. We say strive on, but we also say let go, but we strive on to let go. We are making the effort to let go. That's the right effort there. Rather than making an effort to do something which constructs or reconstructs, and that is the space that will ultimately fall apart if we continue to let go.

What do we mean by letting go? It depends on the context, it depends on where we are at in the practice, but at the deepest levels of letting go it's really about letting go of the identity with any kind of effort all together, and letting go of the identity with any kind of doing altogether, because the moment we start doing something the I, the me, the mind comes up, but the moment we let go and we just see it for what it is, that hindrance, that formation, that concept, that whatever, is liberated by itself in the very seeing of things. That's the knowledge and vision of things, that's the liberating vision, the very seeing of it, the mind lets go. Quality of effort, learning, because effort means different things depending on what your culturation is. And this whole gradual training, it isn't like flipping a switch, or maybe it is to some people, I don't know about that, but every step of the way every sit mattered, all those flight hours, where it kind of little by little, little by little

it falls away and you don't sometimes even know it does, it's just not there anymore. So some expectation or the intensity of effort changes. You just learn kind of along the way, but that seems to be, in retrospect, the quality of effort has had a big difference in the lead. And learning to let go, we're not trained to that in the world. Yeah. And so what that letting go can feel like is almost like you're disappearing, you're dissolving, and there's this sort of quiet fear, which I think is built into us by evolution, you know, any animals that don't want when they're fighting, but that rather than try to get rid of the letting go, of just seeing it, let it be there, dissolve, melt into it, expand

open up until there is no difference between you and what's out there. It's not that the out there goes away or you go away, but there's no distinction. At least that's my language. I think we probably all have to develop our own language, because the words mean such subtly different things, but you can see if there's a little place in there that just gets a little caught. Maybe it's subtle, nobody else has ever mentioned it, but you can see that something gets a little caught, and that's an oh okay, let's relax into that one. Yeah. Somebody has a hand raised. Full moon sangha

Yeah, thank you Delson and dac for this talk. In the last day I came across a sutta from the Anguttara Nikaya 8.83, the roots of all things, and in this talk I remember one last part of the sutta, that is said that all things have as their core the deliverance, and I think that is really important, because when we reach that kind of state we don't have to do anything and all things free by themselves. Yes, so we can trust in that process too, because somehow we are training in this trust in the training itself, and eventually that is the essence, the liberation of the things.

and we can trust that the trust, the release, will happen by itself, because as long as we're trying to do it or find it, like I oftentimes think that the problem with the suttas and the texts is not who said it but who translated it, because it's come through all these layers of language and culture and everything else. So the question is, if we understood what he was saying, what would we understand? It's not that it's right there waiting to be seen, but what is it that he was pointed to or referring to? Yeah, and we won't know that until we feel it. Yeah. The idea of the deliverance happening in all objects, I mean, this is very profound in my mind, because the Buddha talks about the danger and the escape from it, from anything that comes up, and the danger is obviously

the identification with it and all of that that follows suit, which then ultimately ends in suffering, but the escape from that, which is the letting go. And again, when we say let go, it's the dropping, and then it depends on what layer of dropping, what layer of letting go that we're doing. There are some amazing interesting suttas that the Buddha discusses, especially in Anguttara Nikaya and Samyutta Nikaya, that point to all of these different things, and at some point we will get to those in our weekly talks. But suffice it to say that what we think Nibbana is, it's not that, right? Even the words that are mentioned in the suttas that point to that thing of Nibbana,

they're the best descriptors that can be given in the context of language and culture, as Doug was talking about, and they give a little flavor of it. As Anne was saying, there are different flavors of it. The flavors are coming in as a result of the mind's interpretation from having touched it. The interpretation is not the thing itself. The interpretation comes post the experience, and it's the mind trying to unravel what it's experienced, it's the mind trying to figure out what it's experienced, and if you can catch that and see that and just see that as another process, then it won't really matter whether it's called the refuge or if it's called the shelter, if it's called that instead. Your mind will just continue to rest in that space

Yeah, and as the mind catches that, as the mind catches that, it will see that it's got caught on it, and then that can release itself. But if we're trying to get to the full release, then we're trying to run around it or something. Just let it all be there, let it all be there, and then it dissolves on itself. Yeah. Anybody else would like to add something or ask a question, to the effect that you say you can't do it on purpose? It's hard to explain that, because we keep trying, we're

But you can know it. You can know it. It doesn't run into language, but you don't know it well. It helped. I kind of changed my attitude in meditation, because instead of I'm going to go meditate, I feel like I'm more availing myself to what arises, rather than I'm going to go do something, because it got in my way for so long. It was in my way for so long, that I was trying to meditate, and then I just, I'm just going to avail myself to what experiences here, and that kind of helped a lot. Just for future reference for anybody.

That's great, that's great. No, very profound discussion. Thank you so much. Love you. Thank you, thank you. It's good to see you. I rarely see you on these Sundays, but it's nice that you attended. No, it's been rather difficult the last few weeks. I'll be more regular now. Yeah, I hope to see you more. Doug, there is a question: is the book available on Amazon India? Would you know if that's the case? High Altitude Meditation. I have no idea. 2 700 groups? Yeah, it is available. I just, yeah.

Thank you. So I think we can end it here, and we hope to see, yeah. I, all this profound talk, has me going into nirvana and I can't continue now. I just want to cease, you know. So, but I hope, first time I've ever heard you lie, but the hope is that all of you have benefited from this dialogue and Doug's input on this. Hopefully we will see some of you. I know some of you are out of the US and so on, but if you're still motivated to come and join us in July, it's from Jordan, you might have to correct me, it's 29th, no, 31st. 31st of July to the 6th of August, right? To the 7th? To the 7th of August. You're close, that was very close, and it's one of the most beautiful places you could possibly go meditate.

Yeah, it is. It is a lot of great spaces for meditation, and I think it'll be a little cooler, that, no, it's going to be July, so it'll be relatively warm, but it'll be nice. Perfect. Yeah, it's perfect. What you promise, it is. It is just perfect. All, you've all, many of us have been there, so that's why it's there, and I'll pick you up at the airport if you're flying in, or drive in. It's a great ride. Hope to see you there. Yeah, thank you everyone, and I'll see you guys another time. Bye. Thank you.