Why we need to train our mind

A short discourse and guided meditation.

Transcript of discourse…

This is why we need to understand the spirit of the yogi, the attitude, which means I am working on the mechanics of my being and refining them so that they function in a more enhanced way.

So that it doesn't matter what I try to do. I come to receive teachings from the teacher. I only need him to tell me what to do. And I can sit down and I can do that. Not I understand it and I'll have a crack at it to the best of my ability. I can do that.

That means that we have to actually train the faculties of our mind, and that's what training in meditation is. Meditation itself, the meditation that's going to take you to where you want to go is this extremely simple thing.

These practices are the bits that we do, the yogic practices to cultivate the mechanism by which we have the experience, right? But both of those two things require that we can use our apparatus really well.

So if you don't work at that, then you can meditate your entire life and you'll have a certain amount of experience. It will take you to a place. But if you don't learn to do it really well, in the same way you can ski down a certain mountain, you can have a nice time, or you can surf on a wave that is no more than three feet in the white water, for example. Anyone who's done either of those two things knows that you doesn't matter how long you keep trying, if you don't learn how to do it properly there's going to be a point where not only are you going to not get any further, you might even get into trouble.

It is worth drilling in the simple foundational stuff, even just to make that connection to Dan Tien and the delicate work we did with the breath . If you then go on and refine until the way that you settle there is exquisite, that alone will bring extraordinary results.

But if I teach you the whole of the microcosmic orbit, and you don't learn to meditate properly, you'll flounder around doing it for 20 years, and you won't experience that bliss of that radiant blissful energy supporting you, and cooling the hot mind, and radiating through your body and nourishing you. You won't experience that.

If we don't learn somehow or another to stop using our mind to meditate there is a place beyond which we will never go, there is a field of experience that we will never enter into, apart from perhaps maybe in sleep, in dreaming or in an altered state that we might bring about some other way. And then it's a haphazard affair, and we don't know how to navigate it.

The mind goes to a point and doesn't discern beyond that - your ordinary mind, your brain. So the subtler aspects of consciousness, we need to know the mechanism by which we learn to get to that place and then meditate from there. That is the single most important thing that a yogi can learn before they take any instructions in, and then do this, you have to learn the way of abiding that turns the mind around so that you can meditate from awareness. You have to. Because the subtle field is not discerned by your mind, and all of this actually is, you know, you can cut the body up and look at it under a microscope, you won't find any of this stuff. It's not discernible.

It's this is like trying to see the software at work in your computer. You can't see it, you know? Look, this is your body, and I can open it, I'm going to have a look at it with my eyes, and I can take it apart, and with my mind, I can understand all the bits that it's made of, but I can't understand why it works, and I can't see how. It's a completely different faculty of perception that discerns the mechanics by which consciousness produces life, and life is conditioned by consciousness.

And if we don't learn how to engage that through meditation, we're just using our mind, which is like saying, I'm looking at this computer, trying to understand why my life is the way it is. I'm gonna figure it out.

Do you get what I'm saying?

This is the single most important thing. This is the golden nugget you learn that in the early stages, rather than the late stages after years and years and years and years of grinding it out through concentration practice with your mind, then you have it at the beginning.

So how many of you who haven't been on retreat with me before have also not followed the stillness programme, where I explain the process of coming to rest in stillness?

You've done one or the other, or neither, neither.

Okay, well, honestly, the best investment you could make is to do the stillness programme. And everything that we're learning here will come alive at a whole new level once you have developed that ability to just stop and not send your mind down into your body to try and work out what's going on, but actually arise as awareness in that in your body. This is a technique we have to learn to go into the subtle through meditation.

I'm taking it for granted that you've all done that work, and it's not the case. So I think it's important that we include that in our retreat this week. And for some of you, that's something you know, you've been drilled in for a long time, but some of you, it's new, because if you go home from here with that and Dan Tian, that alone is a lot, yeah? And we've done some work. We've done a lot of releasing. We've done some great energy work, we've done some chi kung.

But to carry this bundle of packages home and go, Gosh, all those things Burgs taught me to do, and then grapple at them with the same ordinary mind that we're meditating with ordinarily - no.

You don't need all of those practices and do them in the wrong way. You need one or two of them and do them in the right way, and that will bring a lot a lot of fruit. Yeah?

So we're going to go back to this principle. Some of you have just listened to it and practiced it till the cows come home, but it is our single most important thing,

Our meditation and our experience changes dramatically at every level when we know how to do this, because we're not in the domain of trying to figure it out in the mind anymore.

We're in the domain of looking and being with the experience until it shows itself, and all I've got to do is stay with it until it keeps showing itself to me. And I don't need any mind now, because it's all there already in the experience.

But what you can't discern, you can only go and try and figure out, in your mind, you with me?

And so what might look like, as I said yesterday, I'm meditating on emptiness, is you sitting there contemplating it because you haven't learned to discern it, for example.

You meditating in your heart base to discern whether or not it is still or not. You're contemplating the idea of, do I feel still? or do I feel disturbed? But you can't actually discern whether that mirror-like stillness, is emerged in your heart or not because your mind can't see that.

Yeah, you with me?

So what I thought we could do? So this is a meditation you can carry home and practice. We do Mountain Lake Sky and then bring it to dan tien.

So we can put dan tien in the mirror of awareness and just cultivate it from there, because your practice will then come on very quickly.

But if we don't do that, then dan tien won't develop quickly, and your practice won't necessarily come on.

It's very familiar to most of you. It looks very simple, but it's so profound in what it does.

This turning the mind around and letting awareness emerge, all right? So let's do it together…