Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute talk from a two-week retreat at Camp Cedar Glen in 1977, Jack Kornfield draws a striking parallel between the seven qualities of a warrior in Don Juan’s teachings (as recorded by Carlos Castaneda) and the seven factors of enlightenment in Buddhist tradition. He explores impeccability—living each moment as though it were your last, fully present rather than half-hearted—as the foundation, then energetic engagement without fear of depletion, courage to look honestly at experience without flinching, and controlled folly, a lightness born of understanding that all accomplishment will eventually crumble. He then anchors these in three stabilizing qualities: strength through concentration, peacefulness through understanding the mind’s changing nature, and steadfastness or equanimity in the face of all that arises. Throughout, Kornfield emphasizes that these qualities are not exotic but available to anyone willing to practice with discipline and honesty, and illustrates each with stories—including a Zen monastery under siege—that show how understanding liberates from fear. The closing Q&A addresses sense desire and the possibility of happiness deeper than sensory pleasure, grounded in meditation and insight.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 05 C CG.mp3
UUID: 336230f5-f11f-4745-9ddf-2aac46dc3740
Teacher: Jack Cornfield
Collection: Camp Cedar Glen (Jack Cornfield)
Date: 1977 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~5,951
This recording of Jack Kornfield was made on April fifth nineteen seventy seven at a two week meditation retreat at Julian, California. I’m told, although perhaps this is told very often in the western part of the country here, that this area which we’re practicing is an important Indian meeting ground and site. It’s said to be so particularly because the ridge right behind the camp is the demarcation line between this kind of somewhat green terrain and the Bear Desert. If you climb just to the top of this ridge right here and look down the other side, it drops down a thousand feet to a very arid and sandy desert. And this is said to be a meeting place and held to be so in this area of the desert Indians and the coastal Indians when they would come together.
Certainly beautiful spot. One of the most beautiful and helpful expressions of the Dharma, the path of practice, in modern times is the teachings of Danwan as recorded in the books by Carlos Castaneda, coming from the tradition of the North American Indians. And although it’s continents and centuries apart from the teachings of the Buddha in Asia, there are many things that are complementary, many things that are helpful to understand from that in our own path and practice. If you look at the path, the teachings of Danwon describes it as the path of knowledge, the path of becoming a man or a woman of knowledge. It’s the path of a warrior.
And in describing the techniques and especially the qualities of a warrior, Dan Lon very much describes those qualities which in the Buddhist tradition are known as the factors of enlightenment. Those qualities which illuminate and strengthen the mind, bring us to completion, understanding. There are in particular seven factors of enlightenment. And through the teachings of Don Juan, we can find correspondingly seven qualities of a warrior. The first of these qualities for warrior is impeccability.
Don Juan says, there are some people who are very careful about the nature of their acts. Their happiness is to act with the full knowledge that they don’t have time. Therefore, their acts have a peculiar power. Acts have power, especially when the person acting knows that these acts are their last battle. There is a strange consuming happiness in acting with the full knowledge that whatever one is doing may very well be one’s last act on earth.
What matters is that a warrior be impeccable. What matters to a warrior is arriving at the totality of oneself. In beginning our practice, in undertaking the spiritual journey, we undertake the path of a warrior, the path of a woman or of a man of knowledge. Impeccability is the first quality of a warrior. What does that mean?
It means to live each moment as though it were your last, To live each act, each experience in such a full and total way that we’re able to really appreciate its essence, that we’re able to be there without regrets, without worries, means to be fully mindful, fully awake, conscious. You know, it’s interesting. If we reflect on our lives, I think you’ll all all of us see that there’s an awful lot of time that we spend living in a half hearted way. We go to school, half heartedly learn some things, not too much effort put into it. We get into relationships with people wanting something, wanting some kind of relationship, often half hearted, not really fully there.
Might be dangerous, might be difficult, partly there. We relate to our work, to our lives, many things. The more fundamental level half heartedly, just in the sense that when you walk down the street where you live or you walk outside here, you’re not there a lot of the time. You walk down the street and there are people and there are things happening. The mind is off.
What am I going to do? I have to make the shopping list and I have to go shopping and I have to figure out what I’m going get for dinner and then, oh, I forgot about the party I have to call this person about and or plans for work or your next vacation. You’re not there. Or you walk here, exquisitely beautiful mountainsides, sounds of the birds, the sky. Not see it.
Walking along, thinking about, gee, there’s, ten, eleven more days of the retreat and my flight back is and when I get back, I’m gonna tell them all about what happened during this retreat. It’s funny, but it’s also really an important thing to consider. Think about the times in your life that you’ve done something really fully, that you’ve committed yourself fully to it. You’ve done it totally. It’s not a question of whether you succeed or not, but a question of how fully you’re there, how impeccably you’re there.
And I think you’ll you’ll remember and sense the nourishment, the aliveness, the fullness that comes from being impeccable, from being total. So the first quality and the central one, the one that brings all the rest with it for a warrior is that of impeccability, of mindfulness, of being fully and totally in each moment with each experience as if it were your last, not being fearful, not being half hearted. If you work with it, you’ll see it makes an incredible difference in your life. The second quality of a warrior, impeccability, is energy. Warriors, women, men of knowledge, are energetic, have a lot of energy.
They’re not slothful and dull and, oh, well, I I don’t know whether I should sit. Maybe I should take a nap. Maybe I should rest. The quality of a warrior is really being tapped into the source of your own personal energy. Now a lot of people have a wrong understanding about energy.
The idea that there’s a certain limited quantity of it and you have to kind of save it for something that’s important. Well, if I if I work hard or I do this, then I’ll run out of energy and I won’t have energy for the next thing. Kind of timid, fearful. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. If you’re willing to do something really energetically, impeccably, fully, that opens you up to a flow of energy, and there’s more energy that comes from it.
You can see it. When you’re willing to do something totally, it brings energy to the system. It awakens you, makes you alive. Quality of a warrior, the quality of someone on the path is that of energy, bringing a fullness to each situation. Impeccability, energy.
Third quality of a warrior. Quality of a warrior. Warrior is courageous. Courage doesn’t mean the courage to go out and fight with lions and tigers or even necessarily the courage to stand up in the face of other people’s criticism. Most fundamental kind of courage, it’s that courage of mind which is willing to see things really honestly, to not fool oneself, to be completely honest with what’s happening.
Courage to look into the totality of oneself, to be open to pleasure, to pain, to that which is fearful, to that which is very grand. It’s the courage to look at the nature of our experience in the world without shrinking back, without being timid. Warrior is not timid. Warrior is really, really courageous. And in your practice, in all of our practice, for the understanding to grow, for the development of our own qualities of a warrior, it’s essential that we’re honest, that we really look, that we not be timid.
It’s not just to follow the rules. Oh, okay. We’re supposed to sit and do in, out, touching, rising, falling. That’s a start to make the mind quiet, to let you look and see for yourself. You must do that.
If you want to understand, you have to really look and look at everything, every part of yourself, every part of experience without preconceptions. Warriors impeccable, warriors energetic, courageous. It’s a quote from Don Juan. Only as a warrior can one withstand the path of knowledge. A warrior cannot complain or regret anything.
His or her life is an endless challenge, and challenges cannot possibly be good or bad. Challenges are simply challenges. The basic difference between an ordinary person and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge, while an ordinary person takes everything either as a blessing or as a curse. To be courageous means that you’re willing to use every situation, every part of your experience, every interaction as something to learn from, to grow from, to face as a challenge to be with fully, not something to complain about or to worry about, to see as a blessing or a curse. And to take this stance in the world means that in each situation you come to, it becomes a place where you can grow, where your light can grow, where your understanding can deepen.
Courage. Courage to really look in your own mind, your own experience. The fourth of the qualities of a warrior, and these particularly energy and courage, and this one, which is lightness, are all energetic, arousing qualities. Don Juan had a different word for lightness. He called it controlled folly.
Says, a man or a woman of knowledge chooses a path with heart and follows it, really connects, and then looks and rejoices and laughs and then sees and knows. They know that their life will be over altogether too soon. They know that they, as well as everybody else, are not going anywhere. They know because they see that nothing is more important than anything else. In other words, a man or a woman of knowledge has no honor, no dignity, no family, no name, no country, but only life to be lived.
And under these circumstances, their only tie to their fellow men is controlled folly. Thus, a man or a woman of knowledge endeavors and sweats and puffs, and if one looks at them, they look just like any ordinary person, except that the folly of their life is under control. Nothing being more important than anything else, a man or woman of knowledge chooses any act and acts it out as if it matters to them. Their controlled folly makes them say that what they do matters, makes them act as if it did, and yet they know that it doesn’t. And so when the acts are fulfilled, they retreat in peace.
What’s the quality of controlled folly? Quality of controlled folly is really taking joy in life. It’s not taking our predicament, our dramas, and we can create the most complex, wonderful, intricate dramas, not taking them too seriously. It’s having a kind of spaciousness. That spaciousness comes when you look really honestly at where we’re going.
What are you going to do? You’re to write a book or build a building, create a beautiful piece of art? What are you going to do that’s going to last? Certain time to a certain number of years, the people in this room will be dead. Anything that you create will last a while and crumble.
Even these hills, these mountains, this coast will pass, change. What are you going to do that’s going to last, that’s going to make a difference? When you see that, you see that all the things that we get so caught up in, I’m going to do this or become that, they take a different perspective and see, ah, it’s not so much what I do, not so much what I make, because it’s all going to pass much more how I am, how I live each moment, each day. And it gives a kind of lightness to realize that no matter what follies and what dumb things or what grand and beautiful things you do, it all changes and it’s all going to pass. Gives a real lightness.
It allows a kind of space. There’s a really beautiful Sufi quote that talks about controlled folly from another perspective. It says, overcome any bitterness that may have come because you were not up to the magnitude of the pain that was entrusted to you. Like the mother of the world who carries the pain of the world in her heart, each one of us is a part of her heart and therefore each is endowed with a certain measure of cosmic pain. You are sharing in the totality of that pain and are called upon to meet it in joy instead of self pity.
In the books by Don Juan, when he talks about by Carlos, when he talks about controlled folly, he describes a very touching, poignant scene in which he witnesses his own son’s death in front of his eyes. And he says at that moment, he calls upon his controlled folly to see, to remember that, in fact, that’s what’s going to happen to all of us. And instead of relating to it in a personal, oh, poor me, from a place of self pity, to see also the beauty of it and the transience of it all, to see the drama in a much lighter and more full perspective. Doesn’t have to be heavy, and it doesn’t have to be depressing. Practice actually can be incredibly joyful, really light, very wonderful at times.
Impeccability, energy, courage, and controlled folly, not taking yourself too seriously. Then there are three more qualities of a warrior which are stabilizing qualities, make the mind of a warrior stable and strong. The first of these is strength. A warrior is really strong. Again, it’s not the question of strength of body and muscles, but it’s the strength of mind.
Strength of mind comes primarily from concentration. It comes from that which can be cultivated from that ability to direct and focus the energy of the mind. And when you practice and practice and learn how to work with the mind and direct its energy, you’ll discover that there’s more power to be used there in a skillful way, however you wish to use it, than any other source of power in your life. A great deal of strength. That strength really means one pointedness.
It means the ability to focus and to direct the mind. And part of the training that we’re working together with is to learn to use the mind in that way, to focus, to direct, to develop samadhi concentration. Another aspect of that strength is also what I spoke of the second evening, which is patience. It’s a strength that doesn’t waver, doesn’t back up in the face of all the different changes that will happen inevitably as a part of our practice. Ultimately, it’s a strength that comes comes out of the realm of time.
The greatest understanding of patience and the kind of space that I could feel around the most the most wonderful teachers that we visited in Asia. Their patience didn’t come because they were expecting something to be different sometime in the future, but more because they were tuned into that which is timeless in every moment. It’s not something that you’re going to get or change or make different, but come to see and be in touch with that which is timeless in each moment. That understanding brings a great deal of strength and infinite patience. Strength, peacefulness, warriors peaceful.
I think you’ll have noticed the wise people that you’ve met, the warriors, if you will, men or the women of knowledge that you’ve met, that there’s an air of peace about them. One of the most inspiring people we met on our trip to Asia is a teacher of Joseph’s, a woman named Deepa Ma. She’s a teacher in Calcutta, has many students now. Quite an extraordinary yogi. Her teacher was Anagaraka Manindra, also Joseph’s teacher.
And he trained her not only in the higher paths of insight, but also in all the levels of concentration and powers of mind. And to be with her was being with someone who was so still, so peaceful, you could feel that peace in the room. You’d walk in and there would just be stillness. Very inspiring. Warrior’s peaceful tranquility.
Tranquility comes through understanding. Tranquility also comes through a certain amount of restraint. People don’t like to hear about restraint in this country. You know? They don’t even like to hear about tranquility much.
TV and our culture and everything makes it seem like like freedom is the ability to yell and scream and run and do what you want. That freedom is the ability to drink the kind of beer that you like and buy the kind of car that you want and tell whoever you want to to fuck off. That’s really good, solid American freedom. It is. Culture.
What is the freedom that’s talked about? There’s a much so much more profound meaning for freedom, much closer to this peacefulness. That is when you understand, when you look at the mind, this more superficial level of freedom, you’ll see that your choice of a Buick over a Porsche or a, an imported beer over an American one. An awful lot of that is just conditioning, just habit, you know. What we consider to be beautiful in this culture, what we consider to be handsome, what a handsome man is, or what a beautiful woman is, is completely based on our cultural learning.
And you can go to other societies and people look very different. And someone is beautiful if they’re three hundred fifty pounds and round, that’s the most beautiful, or beautiful in some other way. Begin to have a perspective of how much what we take to be freedom is just habit and conditioning. Freedom to gratify sense desires, to follow the conditioning that we’ve been taught. The deeper meaning of freedom comes when the mind becomes still and unmoved in the face of habits and desires and fears doesn’t mean that they won’t still come because they’ll be there for an awfully long time.
But it’s a freedom that when you learn to see the mind and see how it produces such an array of things. You’ve been sitting here. You’ve been watching it. Produces movies and cartoons and songs and and drama and complaints. There’s a whole complaints department.
There’s all these things. When you begin to really see how it works and see that you don’t have to buy into all those parts, that you don’t have to take each one of those voices seriously in that minute, oh, yes. It really is horrible. I have to do something. And then a few minutes later, oh, it’s so wonderful.
I have to do something again. When you can learn to see that desires come and go, that fear comes and goes, that joy comes and goes, attachment comes and goes, there comes a very fundamental kind of peace and a really profound kind of freedom. It’s a freedom that isn’t moved or shaken by desires, by habits, by conditioning. Warrior is peaceful on that level. Whenever the dialogue stops, the world collapses and extraordinary facets of our self surface, as though they had been kept heavily guarded by our words.
When you do the practice, mind begins to get peaceful and the inner dialogue slows down a little. There are a few spaces. You can begin to really see a lot. You can begin to learn. You can come in a more direct way to the totality of yourself.
Allow yourself to feel and experience all these parts. Become very peaceful. The last quality of a warrior, and in some ways, as much as impeccability is, this quality too is the full manifestation of that state of mind of being, is steadfastness. Warrior is like a mountaintop. The sun comes out and shines, and the mountain doesn’t move.
The rain comes, and the mountain isn’t moved. The snows come, the winds blow, and the mountain is there. Seeing and being with in the full way all of the kind of changes that inevitably happen in our lives and yet unmoved. It’s an equanimity. It’s a balance of mind which is unshakable, delightful, joyful, and so liberating no matter what comes, to see it come, to feel it arise, pass away.
There’s a very beautiful story from the Zen tradition which illustrates this quality of equanimity, of steadfastness. It seems that I believe it was in Korea, the time of revolution and civil war. There was a rebel army in general who was rampaging the countryside and taking over a great amount of territory with his army quite ferocious, killing many people, and routing the army of the current government. It seems that he entered one province and completely took it over Because of the stories about his fearfulness, most of the people in the provincial capital fled up into the mountains upon his entering the city. In this capital was a Zen monastery in the provincial capital, and all of the monks also fled except for one, the Zen master.
When the rebel general heard that the Zen master had stayed in town and not also fled, decided he was going to go over and see this man. And he walked into the temple brandishing his sword and saying, don’t you know who I am? I’m the rebel general that’s killed so many people. He said, I am a man who can run you through without batting an eye. The Zen master looked at him and said, and I, sir, am one who can be run through without batting an eye.
At which point, the rebel general bowed and left the temple. There is an enormous power that we forget about, incredible power that comes from understanding, that comes from seeing how all things come and go, that comes with our practice, with the development of equanimity, with the development of insight. And it’s not necessarily the power of action of the man with the sword, but it can be even greater so the power of inaction at times, as demonstrated by the Zen master. Impeccability, that being totally and fully with each thing that you do, the path of a warrior. Energetic, not being afraid, really throwing yourself, being fully with each thing that you do without being half hearted.
Courage, the courage to really look, to really see. Is it painful? Is it fearful? Is it hard? Look at it.
Be with it. Do it. Is the path hard? Okay. What’s more important?
Lightheartedness, controlled folly, understanding that it’s really all a dance. It’s theater. It’s it’s changing, and it will all pass to have that spaciousness of mind. Strength, concentration, the power of mind, Peacefulness, to really let yourself experience and come to peace, the peace that sees how things change. And steadfastness, equanimity, equanimity that’s born of understanding, the fearlessness that’s born of understanding.
All these are the qualities of a warrior, of a woman of knowledge, of a man of knowledge. They’re the qualities of a Zen master. They can manifest through many different personalities, through many different types of people. It’s a beautiful story that was told to me by Korean Roshi Seung Sung, who is a man I’ve studied with somewhat and Richard Barsky’s teacher. When he first came to this country, if I have the story correct, he had a big party, sort of celebrate his arrival, and he invited many Zen masters from around the country.
Katagiri Roshi came from Minneapolis and Kobinchino sensei and Bill Kwang, Suzuki Roshi perhaps, I’m not sure. Sasaki Roshi from Mount Baldy in Los Angeles, Maizumi Roshi. A whole series of Zen masters. And he talks about, I think there were twenty or thirty there. He’s a very important Zen master.
There is such a thing. He’s the patriarch of Korea. And he describes the party. He said, some of them were sitting at the table very, very still, eating in a really proper, slow, disciplined fashion. Others were kind of laid back in their chair, drinking wine and having pleasant conversation.
Others still were like madmen up dancing on the floor and laughing and throwing things around. They were all Zen masters. In some sense, they all had the same understanding of the dharma. They were all warriors, men, women of knowledge, Jyuken and Roshi, woman. Yet each express their dharma, each express their understanding through their personality, through their background, through a different style.
These qualities which you can each hear and you can feel the seeds of in your heart, They’re not going to make you into something like anything that’s ever been. They’re going to be your own blossoming, your own coming to this. And, you know, in whatever path you take really all comes to this, to this balance of mind, to this understanding, this impeccability. There are a lot of wonderful Zen stories, and there are a lot of wonderful Dan Wan stories and Buddhist stories. They’re also kind of boring in the sense that somebody else did them.
It’s alright. It’s nice. What what this retreat is about is doing them, is becoming them. And it’s not quite so difficult as some of you may have thought. It’s not that difficult to become a zen master, to become a warrior, to become a woman of knowledge or a man of knowledge.
It requires discipline and patience, impeccability, energy, courage, all the things I described. I won’t go through the list. But it’s not impossible. In fact, it’s what we’ve come together for. No.
You think about it. What the retreat really is for, it’s a it’s for Carlos when he described his training over ten years with Don Juan. First, was kind of sneaky, and he didn’t understand. It seemed really simple. He was just gonna learn some things for his doctoral dissertation.
And gradually, he became so transformed that at some point, he became even fearful of going home because he felt so different. Become different reasons and different understandings. We start a very simple thing, just watching the breath, paying attention to how we’re walking. But if you really let yourself look and understand, see what’s important in your life and how you can be, how fully you can live, you’ll see the seeds, feel the possibility of your own enlightenment, of yourself becoming a Zen master. And that’s really what the retreat is about for each of us, to use it to really do it fully, to be impeccable.
Questions, please. Don Morris, do you have some of your drugs? I don’t know. No. All I know is what I’ve read in the books.
But I’ll say this, was it was a very beautiful thing for me to read. In the last volume of those four books in Tales of Power, there’s a place where Don Juan kind of sums up for Carlos the training that he has put Carlos through. And he said, I have had you do the drugs, and I’ve had you do this and had you do that kind of thing. And he said, all of this is to get you to learn to see, is to get you to stop the internal dialogue. Which doesn’t mean that it stops.
That means that you come to a place where you can see beyond it, where you’re not just caught up in your habits and desires and fantasies. And in that place where he talks and recapitulates the training, he says, I used drugs with you, Carlos, because you were a particularly thick case. Were very hard. He said, otherwise, it wouldn’t have been necessary. But I did that in the beginning because there was almost no other way to crack it.
Many wonderful teachings, many wonderful techniques and ways of working. We said they all come down to the same thing. They come down to these qualities of mind. And for a long time after those initial years of drug experiences, Carlos’s training with Don Juan, as is described, was one of the same kinds of discipline, of awareness, of impeccability that we’re cultivating here. For the walking practice, now that we’ve expanded the field of meditation in the sitting, it’s still best to keep the walking fairly simple.
Keeping it simple means mostly staying with body sensation. If you find that there’s pain in your knees or there’s some other part of your body that’s calling attention while you walk, then let yourself pay attention to that. If that’s not happening, then be with your feet or with your whole body as you move. By keeping it simple, I mean that don’t walk and look at the mountains and listen to the birds and think about things at the same time. If you want to look, stop.
Pay attention to the fact that you’re seeing and do that fully. If you want to listen, stand still and listen and be aware of that. When you’re done, then again feel yourself standing there and again begin to walk so that you do things for now one thing at a time and really fully. But if there are things like pains in the body, then allow yourself to use that as the focus during your walking. Okay?
Yeah. Paul, you and Joseph have been both talking about since the time, and I take it you don’t need for us to go back into the world and become. Sure. For one thing, before the retreat ends, the last couple of days, talk a lot about taking the practice and working with it in the world. So there’ll be that at the end.
To answer your question for now, The retreat really is a time to learn about ourselves, to learn about our minds and our relationship to our experience. And one of the things that we spend an awful lot of time with in our lives and particularly in this culture is building and feeding and trying to satisfy sense desire, sights and sounds and tastes, body sense desire. We come here in some way looking for happiness or freedom or understanding. It’s a really essential thing to begin to look very directly at sense desire, how we experience it, and how it works. So when Joseph and I talk about sense desire and point out certain of its qualities, like that it can never be fully satisfied because whatever satisfies it passes away, or that at times it feels like a burning in the body, or that to be caught in it is to lose a certain amount of freedom.
That’s not to say that you’re going go back and not follow your sense desires. You won’t be able to, and I can’t do it either. But it’s to begin again with that, as with everything in our life, to wake up, to start to really look and see how that process is happening and see how much you’re caught and how fulfilling it is or how painful it is. And just in that seeing and that opening up and experiencing, you can begin to see how sense desires catch you and how they cause you pain and which ones you’re able to let go of easily and which ones are still important to you. You just become a lot more conscious about the process.
So there’s no prescription on what you should give up when you go back into the world. But rather this space with its rules of discipline and the words about the dangers and some of the pain of sense desire is something that’s useful for you to begin to understand your own mind and your own predicament, if you will, your own experience. That’s really all. So it’s something to work with. The way can I follow-up?
There’s the tone of what you’re saying is that it’s sort of a process of withdrawal, and you withdraw as much as you can. I mean, that’s what your answer is troubling. But it seems to me that no matter what state of mind you were in, some sensual relationship might be appropriate. So there’s a conflict in my mind between that understanding and what you’re saying. Okay.
First and most importantly, listen to your own mind and look at your own experience and and look at sense desire and how you fulfill it and what it does for you. And that’s really your teacher. Okay? I don’t mean to say that people should withdraw because you can withdraw from the world. Even if you go to a cave, you take your mind with you.
And if you’ve sat here, you’ve seen that the mind can create desirable things as well as the body. Well, the body sends stories. There’s no real way to withdraw. I do know from my own experience that being caught a lot, the attachment to those desires, to wanting to fulfill them, has become clear and clear to me as a source of of unhappiness and of of bondage in my own mind. And so I pass that on to you as my own experience and as a hint, something you to look at.
There are also some sense pleasures that I still really dig and do and get off on, and that’s fine too. That’s where I am. And maybe someday I’ll see that they’re not where I want to be. There’s one more thing to say, and Joseph may give a whole talk on it. I’m not sure yet.
And that is just to kind of like to titillate you a little bit. Are there are experiences of happiness that I’ve had, and I think other people who’ve done I know other people who’ve done a lot of meditation practice have experienced, which so which are so much sweeter and so much more fulfilling and satisfying than sense desire. The kind of happiness that comes from a concentrated and peaceful mind, and even more so the happiness that comes from the insight that begins to liberate one from the whole attachment to this body and mind. Extraordinary. They make any kind of sense, desire, and delight that you could fantasize really boring and unpleasant by comparison.
That’s just something to perhaps remember as you do your own exploration. If you really want to use the retreat well, you want to use this time and learn and grow in the most full way, then you must work with continuity and practice, Which is to say that even though there are times between sitting and walking where you may lie out in the sun, or you may go back at night and you’re not so sleepy but it’s time to rest the body, it feels real tired, okay, try and maintain the same watchfulness, the same alertness, the same awareness no matter what you choose to do. So you may lie down after lunch and you may space out too when you come back again. Okay. Feel yourself lying there, feel yourself sitting there.
Again, you can begin to meditate. You can pay attention to the breath or whatever body sensation is predominant. The issue is not so much which posture that you’re in or what you’re doing as to be full, to be total, to be really with each thing that you do. The more continuous you can make your practice, the deeper will the concentration become.