Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Batchelor opens this retreat talk by addressing the gap between anticipation and reality—how we often feel better about a retreat before arriving than during the first difficult days. He normalizes initial fatigue and restlessness, then explores why we meditate by tracing his own journey from idealism to discovering that meditation actually transforms inner landscape rather than being imposed discipline. He anchors the practice in three interlocking elements: faith in our own potential for awakening and creativity; the great courage needed to persist beyond mental, emotional, and physical habits; and what he calls great inquiry—a non-vacillating questioning that checks whether our actions dissolve greed, hatred, and delusion, drawing directly on the Buddha’s Kalama Sutta. He then guides practitioners to investigate impermanence, unreliability, and non-self as lived experience during the retreat, with detailed examples showing how accepting change and avoiding permanentizing our thoughts and sensations opens creative space. Throughout, he emphasizes a middle path: disciplined but inclusive, acknowledging pain without inflicting unnecessary suffering.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 05 IT.mp3
UUID: a4b6b988-7699-4da1-be7f-7a22f749b0e9
Teacher: Batchelor
Collection: Insight Tapes (Batchelor)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~6,789
So this evening, I would like to follow a little from what Stephen was talking in various way. And the first thing in a way, I think when we start a retreat, what is interesting, I think, is that a lot of the time, we feel better about the retreat before we got there. Because we, you know, for maybe a year or six months, you really look forward to this retreat. Because in a way, generally, we remember the glow at the end of the retreat. We generally do not remember the beginning of the retreat, when we book for a retreat, I think.
And then on the first day, we kind of think, oh, why did I lose this? Or we kind of like it, but, you know, it might be harder work than we thought it was. Also, we might feel maybe I think often we feel a little tired. I mean, myself, I feel very tired today. But in a way, the fact that we feel tired doesn’t mean that we cannot meditate.
I think in a way, we have to be careful of feeling that we have to have optimum condition to meditate. I think we meditate how we feel. I feel sleepy. Well, I try to keep awake as I sit. But I’m aware that I am tired.
But I know this too will pass generally. So in a way, to look a little at the motivation. Because in a way, I think there is the feeling that we experience when we sit here on the first day of the retreat. And at the same time, although we might feel a little tired, a little restless, or whatever it is, we actually do it because, in a way, we have the motivation. I think this is interesting to look at our motivation.
Often, when we start sitting in meditation, we generally have all kind of motivation. I want to see it because my friend is doing it and it seems to be good for them. Or I want to do it because whatever. And also because nowadays, I would say it is a lot in the media. I’m always amazed when I see this advertisement with this lady trying to see cross legs.
Sometimes it’s kind of successful, sometimes not so. Advertising perfume or whatever it is, it’s always interesting, you know, that association. You know, that generally meditation is about being peaceful, about being relaxed. In France, they have a word which I love. In France, it’s you are Zen.
And Zen has become part of the French language. And it means to be cool, to be easy, to be whatever. I mean, you see it everywhere. Interesting how meditation has entered the language. And so we generally adjust to that association.
You know, I sit in meditation. I should be peaceful, calm, cool, relaxed. And I hope you feel like that today, but possibly not all the time. So in a way, when we we generally often when we start to meditate, we convince ourselves that this is a good idea. You know, we have an idea that we need to do this.
We want to do this. And I know for myself that why I started to do meditation was because, you know, in reading a Buddhist text, the Dhammapada, which said that before you wanted because I wanted to save the world for a very young age. And he said, before you want to change others, you would need to change yourself. And I suddenly thought, wow. This is so true.
But until that moment, I had not thought of that. I had thought, yes, I want everybody to be peaceful. But I had not thought about my own peace. Because how can I tell help other people to be peaceful if I am not peaceful? And that’s when I realized and that’s what, in a way, made me start to meditate because I realized I could not be free with myself.
If I wanted because I was very idealistic. I wanted to love everybody. I wanted to have no egoism, no jealousy, etcetera, etcetera. And I could not think it away. I could not stop being jealous or egoist or whatever it was.
And I could see that I had this aspiration, but I could not do it just by thinking about it. I could not force myself to be that way. And that’s when I thought, yes. The Buddha, the way he talked, he sounded like meditation could, in a way, help to transform my inner landscape, that there would be more freedom actually within this body and mind complex in connection with my thoughts, sensation, and feelings. So I thought, yes, I’m going to do meditation.
But the first time I tried it in Thailand, I thought, yeah, this is interesting, but, yeah, I mean, this is not easy to do. Then I went to Korea, and then I thought, yeah, I could become a nun. And I thought, oh, well, if I become a nun, you know, I can learn calligraphy, I can learn tai chi, I can learn meditation. So again, trying to convince myself to do this. You know?
And I never learned calligraphy. I never learned tai chi, But I did learn meditation. And of course, the meditation was, at the beginning, very difficult. But what was interesting for me is that something within me, in a way, responded to the meditation. So often, we tell ourselves to do it, but I think, in a way, the doing of it, the motivation change when we do it ourselves.
Because then the meditation is not an idea anymore, but it’s something that we do for ourselves. And in a way, I think when we ask, why am I meditating? In a way, I would nearly answer tautologically because you are doing so. Because in a way, just you don’t need, after a while, any reason for doing it. You don’t need to convince yourself because something within you resonates.
It helps you. I think very quickly, it helps us to be more calm, to be more still, to be more spacious even if it for a brief period of time. But it enables us to feel about ourselves differently and to start to see that we have more freedom with our thought, our feeling, our sensation. I think to me this is in a way the key. We start to feel within our landscape in a more spacious way.
It’s like the the thing is not so kind of crowded and limited anymore. We notice things seem to kind of be more moving, more fluid. And what I would say is because, in a way, as we meditate, I think what we’re developing is this non judgmental awareness. So we become aware of ourselves but in a very different way. Because I think a lot of the time we are self conscious.
So we are, in a way, too conscious of ourselves. But I would say often in a fixing and limiting way. And so the awareness in meditation is not that kind of tight self consciousness, but more this kind of opening up to what we are and what we can be in this moment. So because of that nonjudgmental awareness, we start to look in a way at ourselves in a different way. And I think that also enable us to look at others in a different way.
I think it is very important. It is not just, again, when we’re very self conscious, we actually close this off from others. When we become actually what I would call aware of ourselves In this non non judgmental way, we become also aware of others in that way. And so we start to see ourselves more multidimensionally. And I think we see others in the same way.
And I think that’s why, in a way, meditation brings something. We can’t really put a kind of a we can’t totally describe it. It’s more a feel. You start to feel more spacious, more spacious around all the stuff. So I think in a way, we start to experience ourselves in a less conflicted way, in a non conflicted way.
Because often I think we know we’re battling we were ourselves. We kind of, in a way, strange. We want to be better than we think we are when I think we are better than we think we are anyway. It’s kind of these strange things that we do. We cannot disentangle ourselves.
And in a way, the meditation is trying to disentangle and to kind of, oh, yeah, to be with things in that less way. So I think, in a way, we become closer to life, closer to our potential in this life. And that’s what brings me to faith. I would say that an act of meditation is an act of faith. I know Stephen was talking about belief.
And I think we need to make a difference with belief. We believe in something, but we might not necessarily be sure of it, or we believe it because somebody told us so, and that’s a lot of what it is about in the Kalama Sutta. But in a way, faith is very much faith in our own potential, in our own potential for awakening, in our own potential for manifesting wisdom, manifesting compassion. And to me, in a way, that’s what I would say. Today, you sat.
And I’m fairly sure for maybe quite a few people, it was not so easy. But you still sat and you still walked because you have faith in yourself in this moment. You have faith in the meditation in you doing it. And I think this is very important to see that, to see that we have this faith that in our potential and also in our potential for being creative is not faith in just myself. What I would call is not faith in a rigid, fixed sense of self.
But in a way it’s faith in the fact that we can be creative in any moment. And I think you already have been creative today when actually you were trying to watch the breath and you went somewhere else. But you thought, oh, I am gone. Let’s go back. And to see that you had the creative you had the choice to be distracted or not to be distracted.
And sometimes you choose to be distracted because possibly it was more interesting and enjoyable than just sitting there where nothing truly was happening apart possibly from some sleepiness or some pain. But time to time, you made the choice to be here, to be with the sleepiness, to be with the pain, or just, to be with the clarity of being here in this moment. And that’s a creative choice, to be with what is going on now. And it gives you a little more movement to be with what is arising. I think to me this is what the faith is, the faith to be in the moment, to be able to be by ourselves in this moment.
And it’s not so terrible, it’s not so weird. Because in doing that, we can be with life as it happens instead of being somewhere else. Because I think often we feel we need to be somewhere else. But sometimes, of course, it’s good to look ahead and to inspire ourselves. But I think a lot of the time, if we come back to the moment, we discover things in it that’s going away was blinding us to.
So in a way, sometimes, I would say the faith is obvious. It’s very evident. And sometimes you kind of wonder, why am I doing this? And in a way, the faith seems kind of like far away. But you’re still here.
In a way, to see that you are bigger, the faith makes you bigger than anything you might experience at any given moment. Because often what we do is we reduce ourselves to very small aspect of our experience. And I think when you come back to the breath, you come back to a more wide open awareness of the moment. So as soon as you do that, generally, you are you are kind of wider, you are richer, you are greater than you think you are. So in a way, you come back to the faith as seeds of possibility.
But in one moment, you can be really awake, really clear. And the next moment, you might not. But you have the next moment where you can again be very aware, very present, very creative. So in a way to see, in a way, the meditation as watering the seed of this possibility of creativity, of openness, of stability. Then in the Zen tradition, let’s say you need to cultivate great courage.
But in a way, the faith is not enough. You need the great courage to actually do something from this space. You don’t just believe in your possibility. In a way, you have to do something so that it appears, it is potentialized in a way. So in a way, you have the courage to do the meditation, to apply yourself, and the courage to just sit straight, the courage to try to come back to the breath.
This is courage. Anytime you come back from being distracted, from being sleepy, you have courage. The courage to be present, the courage to be here. And at that level, I think, the courage in meditation on a retreat is to go beyond our habits. Because often, what is it that stops us from, in a way, being aware in the moment?
Often, it’s a mental habit. We might spend a lot of time when we sit ruminating, thinking about the past, thinking about the future, plotting, preparing, planning. Can actually quite busy sometimes. We look very calm, but inside, mentally, we can be very active. And actually to see, do I need to ruminate on this for the hundredth time?
Do I need to repeat this plan for the fifty five time? Or can I just let it go for this moment? I have the courage to let it go. The same with emotion. We can feel all kind of emotion.
We can feel sadness. We can feel joy, excitement, a little boredom, whatever it is. Can we have the courage in a way not to be caught so that they become disturbing emotion? Where we feel kind of in a way caught in this kind of feeling, in this emotion, instead of just in a way, have the feeling pass through us. We are sad.
We are sad. And then it passes. We have a little joy. We are with it. And then it passes.
Can we to me, the fact that we go beyond our habit doesn’t mean that we don’t have the experience. But we’re not caught by the experience. We’re aware of it, and we see it happening, coming, and going. Or physical habit. And I think this is very much a question of, you know, dealing with discomfort.
And to see how can I be with discomfort as I sit? And I know for myself, when I was in Korea, we would sit ten hours a day from three o’clock in the morning till nine o’clock at night, and we would sit for fifteen minutes, five zero, and then we would walk for ten minutes, and then sit again fifteen minutes, and then do it throughout the day ten times. And the last sitting, the last fifteen minutes was excruciating. It was really so painful. I had my other friend.
I was sitting with other women who were really good at sitting. They could sit hours and they had no pain. They could sit an hour, two hours. But I was kind of like, you know, not the great meditator. I could not do it like they did.
So I would be at the end of the sitting and it was so painful and I would move, move, move. So painful. It was like, you know, the fifty minute feels like it was like two hours, you know. But what was interesting was that every day I would go through it. And in a way, every day it was okay.
Because the next morning, it was okay. I did not have that pain. Then when it happened in the evening, I had it. But the next day, it was not there. And and in a way, every every day was the same, you could say it.
But every day, in a way, I felt I was unconsciously, in a way, when I look at it now, cultivating great courage to just go through that last city. It was part of the practice. And it just was what was at that moment. And often I could actually learn to lot, actually from this difficult period. Sometimes I could see through emptiness, through impermanence.
It was kind of interesting because it was a difficult point but also it was a very learning point. So to see, not to be caught so much into the sensation, into our comfort zone, And at the same time, to be careful that in a way with pain, the criteria is that if when you stand up, the pain continues, then you have to find another posture. You have to sit on a chair. But if the pain goes, it mean it was just for that time as you were sitting. This is very important.
If the pain goes throughout the day, then you have to do something else. You have to sit on a chair or find a different posture. Because when I did that, once I was teaching a retreat many year later, and I had pain. When I was sitting, but also when I was walking throughout the day. And after I had a very bad sciatica episode.
And then I learned, if the pain continue after you stand up, change posture, do something different. Don’t just continue with the pain. But if you just go, then it’s okay. So in a way to be careful, to bring our own wisdom to going beyond our habit or having to creatively deal with something which is kind of in a way happening to ourselves. So in a way, the courage to see the courage to persevere.
And then they also say there is the great inquiry, which we talked a little about in terms of the doubt, in terms of the questioning, in terms of the perplexity. And of course, in Buddhism, the doubt, doubt as vacillating doubt, that is seen as an hindrance. Should I do this? Should I do that? Is this a good idea?
Or maybe this would be better. You know, when you’re really not sure, this, of course, doesn’t help us because we’re kind of wondering all the time. Is this the right thing to do? And I would say, don’t worry too much in meditation. Am I breathing the right way?
Am I sitting the right way? I think you’re breathing the way you’re breathing, you’re sitting the way you’re sitting. There is not a right way to breathe or to sit. So I think we have to be careful of that kind of doubt, you know, to be always wanting to do it just the right way. I think we do it the way we can do it at that moment.
But so in a way, the doubt we’re talking about, the questioning, the inquiry is very much as Stephen mentioned. The doubt, the questioning that the Buddha talked about in the Kalama Sutta. The fact that actually we bring what I would call a fresh view, a fresh way of being with it. That we don’t just take things for granted or we just don’t do it then just because of this, that, or another. I find it interesting even in our daily life to look.
Why do we believe what we believe? Let’s say somebody comes to you and has a nice gossip to share. Right? And they come to you and say, well, so and so said that to me. And why will you believe it?
You will generally believe it because you agree with it. If it kind of agree with what you’re kind of thinking, you say, yeah, yeah, you know, this will kind of reinforce what I’m thinking. And if they say something which is totally totally against what you think, then generally you won’t believe it. Only they manage to convince you and to change your idea. So it’s interesting.
Why do we believe something? That’s what the Buddha was saying in the Kalama Sutta. I will Steven mentioned it several times, but I thought I would kind of just look at it briefly. Because what he says is, in a way, do not go by oral tradition. Do not go by lineage of teaching.
Do not go by essay, by the collection of scriptures, by logical reasoning, by inferential reasoning, by reflecting on reasons, by the acceptance of a view after pondering it, by the seeming competence of the speaker, or because you think the ascetic is our teacher. So at the same time, we believe things through all because of all that. But he’s saying he doesn’t say don’t reason, don’t believe your teacher or don’t, you know, kind of believe because somebody says something. He’s saying, check it out. Does it make sense?
Can I apply this? And is it going to help me and to help others? Because in a way, this is a criteria of the Buddha. He’s saying, is it in a way, dissolving greed, hatred, and delusion or not? When you do something, does it make you more, in a way, grasping?
Or does it make you less grasping? Does it make you more anxious or less anxious? Does it make you more compassionate or less compassionate? Because that’s what he for him in a way, in term of awakening, and we’ll talk more about it later, his main point about awakening is that it’s a dissolution of greed, hatred, and delusion, but not as an end per se. But so that we can have loving kindness, compassion, rejoicing equanimity for ourselves and others.
So in a way, for him, the meditation is the way to dissolve the greed, hatred, anger and delusion so that we can have more compassion. So I think it’s very much about, in a way, removing the obstacle to our compassion. And that’s why in terms of the Kalama, and I think that’s why I wanted to to read it, is because he said that if you dissolve greed, hatred, and delusion, and then you have this person who is full of compassion, of love, of joy, of equanimity, then in a way they can benefit everyone, and at the same time, they will be benefiting themselves. And that’s why he said, then you’ll get four assurances. And that’s what Stephen was talking about.
And that’s what he said. If there is another world, and if good and bad deeds bear fruit and yield result, it is possible that with the breakup of the body after death, I shall arise in a good destination, in a heavenly world. So he’s saying, if you believe in karma and rebirth, then if you do good things, if you are compassionate, loving, not greedy, not hateful, then you’ll have a good rebirth. But he said, if there is no other world, and if good and bad deeds do not bear fruit or yield a result, still right here in this very life, I live happily because I’m free from hatred and anger. So again, he’s saying, in a way, to cultivate love and compassion is a good idea anyway for this very life, for every moment we find ourselves in.
Then he said, but suppose evil before the evil doer, then as I do not intend evil for anyone, how can suffering afflict me, one who does not do any evil deeds? So basically, he’s saying, if you are not hateful, if you don’t harm anyone, then you will have a more peaceful life anyway. And then he said, but suppose evil does not befall the evildoer, then right here, I am still purified in both respect because right here, I’m still a peaceful person. So in a way, what he is saying is the way you act doesn’t depend on, oh, if I do good action, then I will have a good rebirth or not. He said, it depends on the result right here and right now.
And in a way, I think that’s one of the reason we do meditation. Because also at time it might be difficult, it does make us feel generally different. It make us feel more peaceful. It make us feel more happy, more contented. And I think very much to me, it makes us more stable and more open.
Stable so that we feel grounded in the moment, in what is going on, and open so we can encounter things in a different way. And why is that? I think because it’s back to this important element of inquiry. That’s when we meditate, we focus, we concentrate, but also the inquiry is important. This the present aspect is looking deeply.
Because I think that’s what makes a difference. That’s what makes a transformation in term of openness. I think the concentration helps us to be more stable, more grounded, not in a tight way, but in a kind of spacious way. But the inquiry, the looking into the characteristics, I think it’s what makes help us in terms of the transformation, in terms of what I would call a creative openness. So that when we encounter things, we are not stuck, we are not tired, we are not overwhelmed by what we encounter.
And for example, what I think I would really encourage you to do during the retreat is to bring that looking deeply, that inquiring, what I would call experiential awareness into your thought, sensation, and your feeling. And to notice, first to notice how changing they are. Because I think we have a tendency to permanentize. We permanentize our thought, our sensations, our feeling. We have a thought, and in a way, we think we have always this thought.
We have a sensation. We think we have we like that sensation the whole day. We have a feeling. We feel we’re going to have it the whole day. Well, actually, you might have already noticed in the day, even in one period of sitting and walking, how changing thoughts are.
One minute you watch the breath, next minute you’re in New York, Next minute, you’re in the breath. Next minute, you are ten years ago. Next minute, you’re here. And next minute, you think about breakfast tomorrow or dinner or whatever it is. To see, it moves.
We move a lot. And that’s why we look into the characteristics of impermanence to see, to notice, to be, I would say, more in touch with our experience. I think meditation is actually putting in more closely in touch with the way things are, but not fixedly there, but more the way they are in terms of flowing, moving, changing. Like for example, myself. Yesterday at two o’clock, I was fine.
By two fifteen, my eyes really was not fine, you know, and it was kind of, you know, itchy and it was kind of really painful. And so I thought, well, this is just some grit and it will go. And then two thirty, it was still there, three o’clock still there. But what I could experience as I was lying in bed waiting for it to pass is that it was not always there the same. Sometime it was not there, sometime it was there again, then it was gone again, then there again.
And then because he was there for two hours, thought maybe it’s, you know, relatively changing but also relatively continuous. And then you have, in a way, the creative creativity. Maybe I should do something about this. So then we go to Newtons, to the chemist. Then we go to the optician.
And the optician first said, well, you know, I see some abrasion, but I don’t see anything there. So, you know, I sit there kind of still painful. And he said, well, I look at it again. And then he he can finally see. And he turned my eyelid and he takes a little piece of an insect wing.
And then I was fine. I mean, was like one second to the next. The difference was amazing. You know, I mean, it was still a little kind of painful, but really not the same. But who would have thought that the wing of an insect would go up there?
You know? And so in a way, one moment, I had it. Next moment, it was gone. And so in a way, to see how can we be in a way open in a creative manner to the changing of our experience. And so, of course, as we are here, we can look more at our own experience, the sensation, the feeling, the thought.
But also we might, you know, notice the light, the wind, the weather, how also things change, how people change. But that’s in a way we have more opportunity to see that in daily life. Here we can more notice in the silence the way we change ourselves. And to see how in that flowing with the change, actually there is a feeling, I would say, of freshness. That’s why we know that’s why I was not so worried when I had the pain in the eyes.
My only concern was that possibly I would not be able to talk in the evening with the pain being that way. And at the same time, I thought, well, Steven can do it on his own. But I did not think, oh, I’m going to lose my eyes. What is going on? I just thought, well, know, must be so great.
We should be able to do something with it. But when we permanentize things, then generally we exaggerate them. When if we are in the fluidity of their change, then we can be more creative with them. There is more space around how to deal with the situation. And then the other aspect of the characteristics is dukkha, where it can be seen as suffering, unsatisfactoriness, but also unreliability.
And that’s an interesting thing because in our life, in this life, in the modern world, everything is geared to be reliable. And the Buddha, he said, no, things are unreliable. And in a way, why things are unreliable? Because they’re changing. And that’s why at two o’clock, my eyes were fine, and at two fifteen, it was not.
Because things are unreliable. Because as I was standing in the road, suddenly, and this is a mystery of the universe, a whirlwind. I had my own private whirlwind, you know, like a little tornado just for myself. Myself. And just as I was standing in the road by the car, there was this whirlwind of dust.
And that’s where the insect come from, from that whirlwind of dust. I mean, who could have predicted me standing there and that whirlwind happening? You know, mean, it’s kind of because there was no wind. It’s kind of the wind. Anyway, and so in a way, this is unreliability.
To see that in a way, at one level, things are relatively reliable. And so far that tomorrow, very likely, I will be here. And instead of me, there won’t be a giraffe. It is relatively unlikely. I mean, how am I stopping breathing is more likely than me being a giraffe.
So there is a certain reliability of this being. It will just should appear tomorrow in the same way. But at the same time, the way it’s going to be is relatively unreliable. I don’t know. Maybe there would be another little mini tornado just for myself in Gawler somewhere.
Who knows? So in a way, to see, to be careful of the way we rely, I would nearly say, in a negative way on our thought, on our feeling, on our sensation. They do give us information. But I think we have to be creative with that information. It is not is not like kind of, you know, nowadays we have this twenty-four-hour news channel.
You know, and they’re saying kind of all kind of things and sometimes it’s true, sometimes it’s not. I mean, most of the time it’s relatively accurate, but sometimes not really so. And to be careful that we don’t see our thought as this kind of, you know, twenty four hours info channel that can be totally relied on. You know, I think often it’s like the information. It can be a little exaggerated.
It can be also a little too proliferating, you know, sometimes. And to see how can I how can I see the unreliability in a creative way, not in a negative manner, of my thought, of my feeling, of my sensation? So to to be stable with it, and at same time, that creativity, that openness, that it can change, it can be different, it can be better, it can be worse. So in a way, to to be again with it in a creative way. And then the non self.
Because sometimes this idea of non self, there is this idea that we know we’re sitting here trying to, you know, see really like the feeling that we’re trying to find some void within ourselves. I don’t think that in term of meditation practice, that’s what we’re doing. But I think non self is about seeing the flow of conditions that forms us inside ourselves interacting with outside ourselves. And so in a way, this retreat being a journey, a discovery of the condition that forms you in any given moment. Because in any given moment, we can’t identify with a thought, a feeling, or a sensation.
But often that’s what we do. We define ourselves with this thought or that feeling or that sensation. But can we in a way see that we are in a way this, nearly like I could say this, conglomerate of conditions, inner and outer meeting each other. And sometimes we feel really bright. It’s interesting.
Sometimes the conglomerate is, yeah, I’m on retreat. Great. Really bright. And then I do the time that the conglomerate, the kind of energy is not there. And you cannot feel it, woah.
And you’re yawning and you’re really tired. But you are not in a way the brightness or you are not the sleepiness or the tiredness. But this is what happens to this flow of conditions according to how much we eat, according to how we feel, according to how much we have worked before we come here, what we did, from where we traveled, or whatever it is. So to see, in a way, how during the retreat can we play with that notion, I would say, of flow of conditions? Of, in a way, what would it mean for me to have feelings, thought, and sensation, To have them, to know that we have them, to be not in that identify with them, not defined by them, but still, in a way, them being part of our organic being.
In a way to to see that we are not our thought, but the fact that we think may have have some effect on us. So that in a way, if we think a peaceful thought, we will be more peaceful. If we think a hateful thought, we will be less peaceful. So in a way, to see how they condition us, of course. But how we cannot be defined, reduced to any one of them.
That’s what in a way the non self is about. It doesn’t mean that there is not a functioning self. But how can we be different within that functioning self? How can it be stable, open, and more creative instead of, in a way, fixed, tight, in a way, kind of a little tense? So in a way, how can we, during this retreat, try to play with this element of the three characteristics?
And also the element of great faith, great courage, and great inquiry. So that’s what I wanted to say today. Are there any questions or comments? Realization. And I suppose I experienced that to be true, that even though it was excruciating, that it’s possible to stay with it and go through it to somewhere else.
And so I’m just wondering why Personally, I don’t see a meditation retreat as a boot camp. So, no, I know Goenka does that and some other retreat do that. But personally, I don’t feel I can inflict this on other people. I think there is enough. Sorry, it’s my kind of a gunk in my eyes.
I have to put this antibiotic in my eyes so I kind of get this kind of gunk. So personally, I feel there is enough pain in our life. I don’t feel that a meditation retreat should add to that pain. At the same time, we need to have a schedule. So the schedule we do is because we think most people should be able to do it most of the time.
Some people more easily, some people with more difficulty. And also us, we can do it. I’m not going to tell you to sit at three o’clock in the morning and not me kind of getting up later at seven. I don’t see the point in that. You know?
If I have a schedule, I do it with you, and that’s why I want a reasonable schedule. I had much tougher schedule in my time. But I am not sure that it is so necessary. I think it can be a good experience. But I am not sure it is necessary because I think even to see the schedule we tell you is uncomfortable enough.
Why should I act to that? You know? And so, again, some people, according to their body, we find it easier to meditate without moving. Some people might have to move a few times. And to me, what I want again is to be inclusive and not exclusive.
So I think there will be opportunity for everyone in this retreat at some point to have a difficult time, and in a way, to go through it and to find a creative way through it and to have what I would call that great courage. I don’t think because I think all of us have to learn from being at peace and experiencing ourselves differently and also going through difficult time. But I don’t think we have add to that. That’s the way I could look at it myself. Yeah.
You you mentioned the difference between mindfulness and self consciousness. And I I’m still I’m still a bit puzzled by that. You know, I I know I’m breathing, I know I’m breathing, and so on. How do you an excessive self consciousness can be a real hindrance to all sorts of things. So how do you move towards that opening up where the eye becomes less of the focus of your mindfulness and it opens up?
I think the first thing the first thing to see and to experience is actually the different degree of self consciousness. So in a way going to what one could say, starting with really bad self consciousness. And then one generally is very intense and you think everybody is looking at you and the whole world revolve around you and you’re kind of generally one is very anxious in this kind of self consciousness. And then, in a way, moving toward what I would call non-judgmental awareness, which also non identified but aware of the functioning. I think this is in a way where one can move from that very self conscious, I am you know, sometimes you sit in meditation.
I am meditating. And then at all the time, actually,