Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 47-minute teaching from a 1977 Vipassana retreat at Camp Cedar Glen, Jack Kornfield offers closing remarks and foundational meditation instruction for Western practitioners new to Buddhist practice. He opens with a loving-kindness practice directed toward retreat staff and all participants, then addresses how to work skillfully with difficult emotions and mental states—covering five methods from simple letting-go to more risky approaches like satiation or vivid mental rehearsal. He emphasizes that the simplest approach, bare awareness without pushing or grasping, remains the ground to which practitioners always return. In the second part, Kornfield welcomes participants to the retreat proper, explains the three Buddhist refuges as internal resources rather than external authority, outlines five ethical precepts including silence and celibacy as essential retreat structures, and gives detailed instructions for breath-focused sitting meditation. Suited for beginners and those seeking grounding in vipassana practice.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 16 C CG.mp3
UUID: 7c6b2593-7789-4bc0-b878-4989af88a68e
Teacher: Jack Cornfield
Collection: Camp Cedar Glen (Jack Cornfield)
Date: 1977 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~4,776
To forgive those people who have done pain to us. And following that, may I be forgiven and forgive myself for anything that I’ve done that has caused pain, difficulty for other beings, just as a way of letting go. When in the time that follows, you can begin to feel yourself and your body and your experience here. But to generate feelings of love and compassion for yourself, first of all. May I be happy?
May I be filled with love and caring for myself? May I be peaceful? May I not hold on, have a sense of humor about my life and myself? May I be filled with love and filled with joy? You let yourself feel that for yourself.
You deserve it. It’s the place to begin. Feel compassion for yourself for your difficulties too and pains, which we all have. Will I be filled with compassion and love for myself, patience? And then feeling it, really let yourself grow in that feeling.
Let it come from your heart. Let it nourish you. May I be filled with love, peaceful? And you can direct that towards other people and let it grow. Particularly, it would be a nice thing to send some loving thought, your own mind, to the people who worked so hard to make this retreat possible, to people in the kitchen, Michael and Ed and Shasta, to appreciate the hard work that they’ve done.
To the people who have managed and set up the retreat, Richard Cohen, who’s worked very, very hard, to the Lummi people who taught here also, Robert, Lisa, Billy, and very much due to Jim Hahn, who did an impeccable job and worked very hard in what was invisible to you, but was really necessary in setting up the retreat, finding the place, taking care of a lot of the preliminary work to make it possible. May they be happy and feel the same love sharing it, peaceful? You can let it grow and grow in you and fill the room. May all of us who’ve shared in this experience feel this love, be peaceful with understanding, And may it be shared in the fruits of this work and this time together, be shared for the benefit of all beings in all directions. You can feel it above, below, to the left, to the right, in front, behind.
May all beings everywhere be peaceful. May they all be liberated and free. May they all feel this love and acceptance. Chant that pays remembrance and respect to the qualities of Buddhahood of enlightenment and compassion, to the qualities of the Dharma, of being true and helpful, immediate, that which can be applied in the life of each person. All things that have the nature to arise, pass away, are impermanent.
Understanding this law and letting go, we can come to the highest happiness. It’s an important question because a lot of people have asked or thought that kind of thing. Let me see how best to respond, best as I can anyway. The middle path is not even saying that it excludes excess. Okay?
The middle path in its most subtle sense is that balance of mind which allows you to see things clearly, which allows you to be fully with what’s happening. The traditional teaching, in order to be able to let go of things, to become free, to become really fully here, they’re talking about different ways of working to let go. The most simple way is that which we’ve been practicing here, is to allow whatever it is to be there and simply to let go of it. Very easy. Easy in the sense that it’s a simple thing.
It’s not easy in that there are a lot of things that come up that are awfully hard to let go of. You could see from the question before this, but you can see it as much in your own mind. Which kind of thoughts, which kind of fantasies, which kind of fears, whatever, are hard to let go of that you get caught in a lot, which personality traits. There are several other ways to work to let go, to come to balance. The second that’s talked about is to use sublimation, Sometimes skillful.
What that means is sometimes that you can take energy which is difficult for you to work with and change it into some other energy that you can work with. Sometimes you would be really angry and a typical example and to take that and go and do some physical labor that disperses that energy in a creative way or helpful way. Or sometimes you might feel a lot of lust in a way that that isn’t really helpful to you, that’s really caught up in some old pattern. You can take that energy, you can work with it not only externally but internally and feel yourself moving in your body till you feel it is energy of love rather than it’s grasping. Sublimation.
Another way of working, talked about, is, repression. Not for good, but temporarily, and I’ll see if I can an example to explain it. Certain times it’s not appropriate to work with some things that are happening. Suppose that you were a heart surgeon, okay, and you’re on call at the hospital and you’re having an argument with your husband, a real big fight, okay, and there’s no other heart surgeons around. There’s been an automobile accident.
There’s someone on the operating table. They call you in. You leave your husband and your argument in the middle, and you’re there with this person on the operating table. It’s not an appropriate time to be working out your argument with your husband. Okay?
It’s time to put it aside for that time and wait until there’s a space where it’s skillful to look at it and feel it and to let go of it. Okay? Fourth level of working is to take that which is difficult and work with it in your mind to excess, which is to say you’re angry at somebody. Imagine yourself taking that fantasy to the end, you know, biting them or screaming at them or kicking or whatever would feel good to you or any other kind of thing that that you feel really strongly about. Taking it to its extreme in the mind so that that becomes a way that you can see the whole thing and allow it.
And in that really letting it be and letting it develop, you can then let go of it. The last way also can be skillful but is karmically the most dangerous of them, is for certain kinds of things to do them until you get sick of them. There’s a story that Joseph tells of his teacher Munindra who was, really hooked on a certain kind of Indian sweet. He would eat a lot of it often and couldn’t go without it almost. And he got tired apparently at one point of being so caught up with these sweet tooth and sweets.
And so he went to the bazaar and he bought some very large quantity of this sweet. And he sat down and he just ate it until he was sick. And after that, that desire, that desire had passed to some extent. Okay? He did the same in a sense by working with your bitchiness, okay, until it had passed.
The difficulty with talking about these different levels of ways of working and letting go of stuff is that as you go from letting go toward going to extremes, you get to more and more potentially dangerous ways of working. They can be skillful, but the danger in them is that while you do them, instead of using it to become aware and feel it fully, you can’t really let go of something that you haven’t felt fully, You do it and reinforce it and get into it more and get more identified with it. Okay? And so, there are a whole lot of different systems of meditation, of teaching that help bring us to balance. Okay?
Bring us to balance means to come into the moment in a way that’s free of grasping and pushing away. Okay? And that means learning how to let go of things in different ways. The simplest being simply to let go and then all these other I talked about. None of them are better than any others, but some of them are a little trickier.
That which we’re practicing here is the most is kind of like the ground of it, the most basic level, and that to which you will always return, which is to learn how to allow things to come at the mind and feelings in the body and to simply let go, to simply be with them. Does that answer your question? Let’s go over again what you mean by the dharma when you say follow the dharma. I don’t I don’t remember how I used the phrase follow the dharma, but when you ask it, what comes to mind is that you can be involved with your life in different levels. Sometimes it can be on a really trivial basis, concern over certain material possessions or money, for example.
Sometimes it can be on a somewhat deeper basis, concern for your family, your parents, your children. Sometimes it can be not excluding those first two levels, but also on the most fundamental basis of what am I to do with this time that I’m alive? What is the most fulfilling thing I can do for myself in relation to all the people around me? That I can come to the most deep understanding and be of the most help and love for myself and these people. And to follow the dharma really means to follow that basic question.
And be honest. And be honest. The labels the labels are a tool and they’re helpful to keep you from getting caught up in thoughts which are really seductive in the beginning and trying to watch them. So use them when they’re helpful, and if you find yourself getting caught in feelings or thoughts, that’s especially a good time to use them, thoughts and feelings. If you feel like they’re getting in the way, then you can drop them and just have a silent awareness of what’s happening.
What’s important is the awareness. I realize after these two questions already that I’m kind of questioned out. And in some ways I hope that you are too, although I’m sure that there will be questions either about practice or more general questions about Dharma. Again, it’s like Ajahn Chah answering those three questions. Why do you eat and how do you eat?
And how do you feel after you’ve eaten? Trust yourself. Okay? Most of the answers you really have. If you need to do an imaginary interview in your mind, okay, most of the time all we ever say is whatever you’re holding on to as that’s it, let go of that too, and just be aware as best you can of what’s happening.
You can’t be aware wrong. You’re either aware or you’re not aware. Okay? So try and be aware. And that’s really all.
Okay. Thank you. The following meditation instructions were given at a course taught by Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield at Camp Cedar Glen during April of nineteen seventy seven. I’d like to welcome you all to the nineteen seventy seven April Fool’s Vipassana-Lomi meditation retreat. We chose to come to Southern California initially because we thought that it perhaps would be cool in Northern California and we would come for a weather change.
Indeed, we have come for a weather change. Both Joseph, myself, have just returned from a journey to India and Burma and Thailand to visit our teachers. We’ll be assisted by Jackie Schwartz and Richard Barsky in teaching. And in addition, there will be instruction by several of the Lomi faculty. I don’t know where they are now.
I’ll introduce them in the morning. Robert Hall and Alyssia Hall and Bill Prann. It’s a very special and wonderful thing to come together as we can for a meditation retreat. Few people in the world have the kind of time, have the facilities and the place to be together, and have the teaching, the instruction. To have all three of these as we do is a really precious, precious thing.
And I feel it, and I welcome you in that spirit, spirit of coming together as a community to begin what is sometimes extremely difficult, but perhaps the most exciting and important thing that we can do in our lives, which is take the time to be quiet, still, and to begin to really pay attention and to listen to our own minds, to our hearts, to our bodies, to learn to listen in a very full way to who we are and what we are, and from that listening perhaps to come to a deeper understanding and vision, each one of us for ourselves and for our life. Because we’ve traveled a long way, many of us today, try and keep the introduction tonight brief. And as Richard Cohen said, tomorrow morning at eight o’clock, we’ll announce the full schedule and do the rest of the instructions. Beginning a meditation retreat in the Buddhist tradition, it’s quite standard to start by taking something called the three refuges. I’d like to begin in that way for us and explain them to you.
The three refuges, refuge in the Buddha, in the Dharma, and the Sangha. To take the refuges, it’s been said by Trungpa Rinpoche, means to become a refugee. Take the refuges in a sense is a kind of surrender. To take refuge in the Buddha means that for the time of our practice, we take refuge not in the Buddha as a historical figure outside ourselves, but rather in our own Buddha nature. We take refuge in the seeds of wisdom and enlightenment and love that are found in each one of our hearts.
So that through all of the changes and experiences of this retreat, that is a place of reference for us, to go to our own hearts, to our own enlightenment, our own wisdom, to take refuge in the Buddha within us. To take refuge in the Dharma, the Dharma means most fundamentally the truth. To take refuge in the Dharma is to take refuge in doing our practice in an uncompromising way, to be willing to undertake this journey of learning, of investigation, and look most sincerely and honestly at what we see and what is there. To take refuge in the truth means to allow ourselves to listen in a new and fresh way to our experience, to our bodies, to our minds. And from that which we see will come wisdom, will come understanding, will come a fundamental kind of security that is not based on anything we’ve been told or heard or learned outside ourselves.
The third refuge is refuge in the Sangha. Traditionally, the refuge in the Sangha meant to take refuge in the disciples and followers of the Buddha and of the spiritual path. The more fundamental sense to take refuge in the Sangha means to understand that we cannot undertake spiritual practice alone. In coming to this retreat and meditation, although it will be in silence and in some ways apart from the world, so it may give a sense of being alone. In fact, each of us is intrinsically interconnected with everyone else here, with everyone else that’s a part of our life in the world that we’ve come from.
The learning, the love, the understanding, the patience that we develop with ourselves, the insights that we come to, the difficulties that we overcome and learn from. Each one of these will be an experience that transforms who we are and how we understand ourselves. And when we leave here, when this community breaks up, we go back to the rest of our lives, everything that we’ve done will have transformed us so that each person that we meet will experience the results of our own work and our own understanding that’s come from this practice. So to take refuge in the Sangha means both to derive the support from the community of all of us as seekers and as understanders of wisdom. And it means to understand that this practice is undertaken with the basis of compassion, that it’s impossible to do it just for yourself alone.
For the greater your understanding and the greater your love, the greater your light will be to share with each new situation and each new being that you come in contact with for the rest of your life. I’ll go through the refuges many times repeating them. You can just listen to them and recall in your own mind silently as I do what they mean to you, for yourself. I take refuge in the Buddha. I take refuge in the Dharma, the truth.
I take refuge in the Sangha, in the community of practitioners, the compassion of the practice. In addition to the refuges, there’s a basic basic structure of precepts, which are essential for us to live together as a community in harmony, are the essential foundation for the meditation practice. These precepts are the traditional five Buddhist precepts, plus several other rules that will help us to live and work together in a way that’s been shown to be an effective way of practice for a group this size. First of the precepts is abstaining from killing. To undertake the training precept of abstaining from killing any living creature, even the smallest ants and mosquitoes.
To undertake this precept means to begin to cultivate a reverence for the surroundings, for the life that we coexist with on the planet, and in particular in this place that we’ve come to. To take the precept of abstaining from killing is a fundamental training and resolution in the mind to come into a greater harmony with all the living beings around. Second precept is to abstain from taking that which is not given, to abstain from stealing. Again, it is a fundamental basis for a harmonious living of a group of people to not take that which does not belong to us. The third precept is traditionally to abstain from speaking that which is untrue, slander, gossip, lies.
But in the case of the retreat, it will be very simple, is to abstain from speaking. The only times that you will be able to speak will be with the teachers during interviews, which will be given every other day, with the manager such as Richard Cohen if you have business, if there are things that you need, and to ask questions after the evening Dharma talks. Other than that, in order for the retreat, for the energy of us to practice together, to work well, it’s really an essential and important part of this that you maintain strict silence. Fourth of the precepts, traditionally to observe, abstain from sexual misconduct. In the case of this retreat, it means to observe celibacy, to refrain from any sexual interactions whatsoever.
Instead, we’re going to create a space of silence and stillness and to use the support of the group and yet to stay inward and to be with ourselves, to listen to our own minds and bodies. The fifth of the precepts is to abstain from intoxicants, from dope, from any kind of drugs, from alcohol, from anything that would alter or change our normal state of experience chemically, so that we can work with and learn to use, learn to become more conscious in the context of our normal, unaltered by drugs experience. I’ll go through the precepts again. You can take each one in your heart as you listen. I undertake the training precept of abstaining from killing any living beings.
I undertake the training precept of abstaining from taking that which is not given. I undertake the training precept of abstaining from speaking. I undertake the training precept of abstaining from sexual interaction, remaining celibate. I undertake the training precept of abstaining from intoxicants and drugs. In addition, several other rules to create the environment of this investigation and this space.
Request that you all refrain from writing and from reading. Recommend that you try not to make eye contact with one another, to really create your own separate space with which to listen to yourself in the context of the support of this group. No one should leave the grounds of this camp unless there’s something that special that comes up and then you can come to talk to one of the teachers or the manager about it. In essence, what we’re trying to create is a space in which people are silent, in which there are no distractions, in which there’s a time to sit, to walk. The daily schedule will be one of sitting meditation, walking meditation, alternating, time for eating, interviews, in which we can listen, in which our lives become very, very simple.
And in that simplicity, to make a space to really learn to listen and hear our minds and our bodies. Are there any questions about the precepts, the refuges, anything I’ve said so far? It’s truly a joy to be here, and I feel especially full of full of love and full of appreciation having just returned from being with my teachers, monasteries in Asia. They were extremely loving and very encouraging of our teaching and of the Dharma practice that’s happening in the West. And so it’s a real delight to be able to share this space with you.
Tomorrow morning there will be more extensive instructions and we’ll go through the schedule in detail. For the rest of this evening, we’ll do a short sit in. Joseph will give instructions for that, and then people can either go to the dining hall if they have to meet with the manager or else to sleep. We’ll begin the sitting practice with a very simple object of concentration. Take a comfortable position, as comfortable as possible.
Your back should be reasonably straight without being stiff. Your hands can be folded in your lap or on your knees, whichever way is comfortable for you. What’s helpful in the sitting practice is not moving very often. So try and take any posture that’s comfortable for you that you’ll be able to maintain for as long as possible. The eyes should be closed gently and softly.
Those of you who have done a practice in which you have trained with the eyes slightly open, you can continue that way if you like. Otherwise, let them close softly. Practice will begin by paying attention to the breath, and that can be done in one of two ways. You can notice the breath as it enters and leaves the nostrils, keeping your attention fixed, the area at the tip of the nose or the upper lip, feeling the sensation of the air as it goes in, feeling the sensation of the out breath. There should be no forcing or directing of the breath.
Let it follow its own natural course. Sometimes it may be fast or slow or heavy, shallow, deep. The rhythm of the breathing may change. Your only task is to notice the quality of each breath as it comes in and out, feeling the sensation of it without forcing it, without directing it. It’s helpful to make a mental note of in as the breath comes in and out as the breath goes out.
In the beginning of practice, the mental note helps to keep the mind on the object. It’s a way of developing concentration a little more quickly. Most of your attention should be on the experience of the breath. The making of the mental note is secondary, five percent of your attention on that. Focus primarily on the feeling or sensation of the breath.
And in the background, let the mental note be made of in, out, in, out. The other way of attending to the breath is noticing the rising and falling movement of the abdomen. When you breathe in, you may notice that the abdomen or belly extends out or rises. When you breathe out, it falls. You can make that rising, falling movement the object of your attention.
For many people, it’s a very noticeable object and one on which concentration can be developed very quickly. Again, in the same way as one attends to the breath of the nostrils, you notice the entire movement of the abdomen rising from the beginning through the middle to the end, experiencing the sensation of the movement. Then again, as the abdomen falls, keeping the mind attentive and precise, letting the awareness become very sharp with that movement of the abdomen as the object. And again, a mental note can be made: rising, falling, rising, falling. There should be no forcing or directing or hastening of that movement either.
Let it happen in its own natural way. In the first few minutes of practice, you can experiment and see which object is more clear to you, either the in out of the nostrils or the rising and falling. Experiment for a few minutes, decide which one is more clear, and then stay with that object for the duration of the retreat. Don’t go switching back and forth after you’ve decided. It may be that you’ll decide to stay with the rising, falling movement, and after a few moments, it might become less distinct.
And there may be the tendency to then go back to the in and out of the nostrils. Don’t do that. Once you’ve chosen which object you’re going to attend to, stay with it through all the changes. At times it will be clear, at times it won’t be. Keep your attention focused on one or the other of those two.
You’ll find, especially in the beginning, that the mind probably will wander a lot. You’ll begin by noticing the breath or the abdomen, and after a few minutes, the mind will be lost in thought. As soon as you’re aware that you’re thinking, simply notice that you’ve gone off and come back again to the breath or the movement of the abdomen. The first few days of the retreat are primarily an exercise in developing concentration. That is the ability of the mind to stay one pointed on an object.
Every time the mind wanders, bring it back again. Without forcing or without tension, without getting up tight about it, gently, but also firmly bring the mind, the attention back to the object. Don’t indulge the thinking process. As soon as you’re aware that you’re off, come back again. You’ll find that this repeated bringing back of the mind to the object will develop the samadhi, the one pointedness of mind.
And that’s what will make possible the growth of insight. Do you have any questions about what to do in the sitting practice? K. This evening, we’ll keep this sitting quite short. You’re probably pretty tired just to get a feeling for what the beginning practice is like.
The following instructions were given on the second day. To begin this morning by reviewing the instructions for the sitting practice given last night, then at the end of the sitting, go over the daily schedule and also instructions for further aspects of the practice during the retreat. That will be followed by some Lomi work. The practice during the retreat will be a combination of the focusing or concentration of the mind and of a development simultaneously of a balanced awareness. The initial days, our focus will be primarily on concentration, on stilling the mind, on directing the power of the mind to be able to see more clearly what is happening within our own experience.
In order to do so, we start with a very simple exercise, a simple training in awareness and concentration. This is to pay attention to the sensation of the breath at the nose tip as it passes in and out, or to pay attention to the sensation of the breath with the rise and fall, expansion and contraction movement of the belly, the abdomen. Sit and take a relatively comfortable posture, one that you can hold without having to move frequently.