In this excerpt from their online course, Beyond the Cushion, Doug Qapel Duncan and Catherine Pawasarat Sensei talk about the value of meditation and the reason most of us find it so hard to maintain a solid practice. They also talk about their focus on ‘Meditating on the Fly’, the idea of integrating meditation into our daily lives outside of our formal daily practice, and the tremendous impact this can have.
There are many ways to experience this modern formulation of the teachings. These 4 pillars are infused into Planet Dharma’s diverse range of in-person and virtual programming to meet spiritual seekers where they are. From online courses and classes to full-length meditation retreats on topics ranging from Buddhadharma to Western Mysteries, you’ll find an offering that works for your context to speed up your spiritual unfoldment. Visit planetdharma.com/events to see which experience will help you with your awakening this year.
Podcast Transcription:
Welcome to Dharma if You Dare. I’m Christopher Lawley, Planet Dharma team member and producer of the podcast. In this second in this series of episodes on the ‘Four Pillars’ of Planet Dharma’s approach to working with students, we will hear about meditation. In this excerpt from their online course Beyond the Cushion, Doug Qapel Duncan and Catherine Pawasarat Sensei talk about the value of meditation and the reason most of us find it so hard to maintain a solid practice. They also talk about their focus on ‘meditating on the fly’, the idea of integrating meditation into our daily lives outside of our formal daily practice, and the tremendous impact this can have. There are many ways to experience this modern formulation of the teachings. These ‘Four Pillars’ are infused into a diverse range of in-person and virtual programming to meet spiritual seekers where they are. From online courses and classes to full-length meditation retreats on topics ranging from Buddha-dharma to Western Mysteries you’ll find an offering that works for your context. To speed up your spiritual unfoldment visit www.planetdharma.com/events to see which experience will help you with your Awakening this year. And now here’s today’s recording.
Qapel (Q): There’s no substitute for meditation. We recommend everyone does a minimum of 2 to 4 week meditation retreat every year, at least. And every 5 to 10 years, do a 2 to 3-month retreat. This is like brushing your teeth or having a shower mentally and psychically and energetically. It makes such a huge change in your health and more importantly, it’s going to change how you get old. When you get older, the things you haven’t developed or you haven’t worked on get more dominant. So if you do this kind of work then as you get older, you stay vibrant and keen and integrated, which is cool.
Catherine Sensei (CS): So those are obviously bigger commitments and need some planning and preparation and so on. But in terms of the day-to-day, historically, two hours of meditation a day was, for professional meditators or professional spiritual practitioners, two hours a day was considered maintenance, six days a week. That’s what Namgya Rinpochel told Sensei (Qapel) who was meditating an hour in the morning, an hour at night.
Q: And so I told him. He said “how much do you meditate?” and I said “two hours a day, six days a week”. He said, he looked at me, I thought it was kind of good going, you know?
CS: Yeah, that’s pretty amazing, right?
Q: And he said “No. Maintenance”.
CS: So this is not to make anybody feel bad. We know that that’s very challenging. That’s challenging for us too. An hour day would make a real difference in all our lives, and it’s worth saying that something is better than nothing. So if you’re struggling to find that kind of time, just meditate however much you can, every day. Just every little bit helps.
Q: Just try to keep your minimum time to 20 minutes because it takes 20 minutes for the organism to settle down and find its calm place. And if you meditate into the 40-55 minute category, then you start to get breakthroughs, but the 20 minutes at least will give you a calm foundation. And if you can manage to do two hours a day, even better.
CS: So, the general guidelines are to meditate six days a week and then integrate on the seventh day. And consistency is really key.
Q: And the key thing is of course, a daily practice, it’s like brushing your teeth or having a shower.
CS: Or or getting any kind of exercise, getting outside every day. So why is meditation so important? We don’t want to just assume that everybody knows or take it for granted. So, a daily meditation practice, augmented by retreat time, that is the best way to understand consciousness, and that’s the best way to get to know your own mind. Now, your own mind is your constant companion and is really influencing your life a lot. And it’s amazing how few of us really know our own minds that well. So it’s kind of like driving with our eyes closed or something. Before cars drove themselves! Okay, this is how we get to know our own conditioned patterns and how we learn to be able to just be with conflicting emotions and incomplete views and let them resolve themselves. That’s what the being is always moving towards – completion, towards integration, towards resolution. But we have to be present with these things in order for that to happen.
Q: And you catch them in real-time. So you’re getting them as they arise. You’re not in reaction to them. So when a particularly troubling thought or troubling emotion arises. It’s not like you’re dealing with it after it happened. You’re seeing it arise from the sea of the mind. And so seeing that it came out of nowhere and recognizing when it disappears that it’s going back to nowhere, your degree of investment you have in these conflicting emotions or these troubling views is really small because it came from nowhere and it went to nowhere, where was your trouble of yesterday and for that matter, where is your joy of yesterday? They come and they go and they come and they go, and we’ll talk more about this when we get to insight.
CS: Yes, meditation is really a way for us 1. to catch our own mind red-handed and 2. to start to get glimpses of just how awesome consciousness is because the entire universe is composed of consciousness. And so with consciousness, anything is possible. And we really need to explore our own minds and make the time and space to be able to see that.
Q: If you want to speed it up a bit go do a ? float. I know a friend of mine who was a student of Rinpoche’s lives in Norway and he got into floats back in the 70s and he bought a package of 50! So he was doing floats like every second day. He was a pretty calm guy – while the tickets lasted I guess. Anyway so the most important part about all of this is you get to develop calm, you get to strengthen your concentration and you get real-time contact with what’s going on in your system, both physically, emotionally, and mentally. And when the body and mind start to settle, which they do of their own, through no effort of your own really if you just sit there long enough, it will quiet down and when it does, you start entering into altered states and these altered states can develop into the jhanas and we’ll get to that in a moment.
CS: Yes, so we’d like to normalize altered states. That’s something that anyone can access with a good meditation practice.
Q: In fact, we thought we’d change the language: we thought we’d call this state that you’re in now ‘neurotic’, and the state that you get in when you meditate as ‘normal’. The ‘normal’ state is when you’re in jhana and the ‘neurotic’ state is when you’re walking around in life. So the jhana isn’t an altered state, it’s a normal state. And this state where we’re a little less than in jhana or absorbed, is a bit weird.
CS: And I guess I guess children show us that because they still have access to those states before the conditioning gets kind of heavy and makes it more difficult.
Q: Well, like anything, it takes a number of hours to get good at anything. So how many hours does it take to be a professional cook or professional lawyer or a doctor or artist or musician? The argument is it takes 10,000 hours. So we thought we’d show you the map. If you did a two-week retreat and you meditated an hour a day, it would take you 20 years to reach 10,000 hours. But if you did a four-week retreat and you meditated one hour a day it would take you 16 years. And if you did a two-week retreat and two hours a day, it would take you 12 years. And if you did a four-week retreat and two hours a day, it would take you 10 years to get the 10,000 hours, in terms of being really good at meditation.
CS: It’s said that Gautama Siddhartha awakened in seven years of meditating all day every day and that is considered fast. Awakening in seven years from when you begin is pretty fast.
Q: So, this is our argument for ‘meditating on the fly’. If you were meditating 16 hours a day, how many days would it take you to get to 10,000 hours? (David: 625) Thank you, David. 625 days meditating 16 hours a day. So how does that tie into getting depth altered states? Well, the funny thing about Awakening is you don’t need the jhanas to awaken. You can Awaken by being in what they call upacara samadhi, which we will talk about in a minute. And you can be in upacara samadhi by ‘meditating on the fly’. So by ‘meditating on the fly’, if you did that 16 hours a day diligently without getting caught in all your problems, it would take you two years.
CS: So why don’t we do this? Why? You know, it sounds kind of sensible, not that hard. Well, the ego likes to tell its stories right? The ego likes to complain and go on and (Q: Interrupt) explain to itself why it feels hurt, worry, have opinions. And so all of this: very human, but it’s distracting us away from what is sometimes called ‘bare attention’. It’s also sometimes called ‘pure perception’ and that’s the state that we need to be cultivating in order to have it, actually be ‘meditating on the fly’.
Q: Yes, so that’s the teacher’s job: to try to interrupt or disturb your ‘meditation on the fly’ and your job is to not be interrupted and not be disturbed by the disturbance. And if you can do that and maintain your equanimity, not get caught up in the storyline, you’re ‘meditating on the fly’, at 625 days, you probably Awakened, chances are close to 90%, you don’t do it because you forget or something bugs you and you get irritated or something scares you and you get anxious or worried. Life is going to interrupt you anyway, life is gonna throw your curves anyway. The purpose of the teacher in this case is to speed it up.
CS: Get good at fielding those curveballs.
Q: So the ‘pure perception’ and the ‘bare attention’ that Catherine was talking about are key. ‘Pure perception’ means you’re just perceiving what you’re perceiving. You’re not putting additional storylines or commentary or dialogue or worry or anxiety or anything else on top of it. ‘Bare attention’ the same thing – you’re just noting. Like a scientist would note an arising in the lab or a doctor would note a change in the pulse or the heartbeat or the state of the patient, keep their cool, just keep doing what they do. Thus making almost a longer journey for almost everyone than that amount of time. So depending on your motivation, your aspiration, and your recognition of reality, that time is either shorter or longer: to meet this state of uninterrupted bliss, clarity and non-clinging.
CS: Okay, so what do we mean by reality? This means very different things to different people. Right? So when we talk about recognizing reality, we mean recognizing what Buddhism calls the four marks of existence. So I’m going to say the Pali first: anicca which is impermanence.
Q: I mean really impermanence. I mean every microsecond, nothing is staying the same.
CS: The second one is dukkha or struggle.
Q: By definition form is in struggle, it’s what it does.
CS: Most people get that one pretty easily.
Q: Yes, I think so.
CS: The third one is anatta or non self. It’s a little harder. We like to say that the self is a compost heap. It’s always changing, it moves. Depending on what you put in, it becomes a different compost heap. That’s one way of looking at anatta. So it’s not a fixed thing that is going to stay the same.
Q: If we look at the compost heap from the outside, we can say well the compost heap stays the same. But if you were the compost heap yourself then you’d never be the same thing because that banana peel just changed your entire world and then the avocado pit changed it again. And you know the tailings from the coffee grounds changed it – you never find a place to stand up and say here I am.
CS: And the baby skunks came and played around in it, totally altering!
Q: Odorifous!
CS: And the fourth one is nirvana. Nirvana is bliss. (Q: Cool.) It’s maybe everybody’s favorite.
Q: And Nirvana is based on ‘pure perception’ and ‘bare attention’. So in that sense, you can say that the Buddha is not really a person anymore in the same way that a compost heap isn’t a compost heap from the inside. It’s a way of paying attention. And because we’re object people we tend to like making him into a person. But really he/she/it is a process. Buddhahood is a process of composting, without any real borders or definitions to define it as any given thing.
CS: A process of consciousness.
Q: Yes. Maybe not the most salubrious image, a compost heap. You might want to think of yourself more as – I don’t know, the Queen of Sheba, but there you go.
CS: Okay, so meditation is really essential for us to see beyond the ego’s reactions. I think probably everybody here has had the experience where you’re alone in a room or on the cushion or in a cabin or wherever and you’ve been alone for quite some time and it’s like New York Central station in there, right? There are fights, there are love scenes, there are love affairs, there’s comedy, there’s tragedy. (Q:Farce.) right? Well in the beginning it’s all very entertaining, right? In the beginning, it’s like, “Oh wow, this is a good one!” The great thing about putting in 10,000 hours is you start to realize that this is the same storyline that I’ve seen, as we say, sometimes this is the same B movie I’ve seen 100 times before.
Q: In other words, it’s a rerun. You’re watching MASH over and over and over and over again.
CS: And the first time I thought it was really great, but now I’m starting to see the holes in the plot and the flaws and the acting, right. And we start to realize how repetitive and uninteresting our internal dialogues really are. More to the point how counterproductive they are and how they’re not wholesome. They’re not helping us to be in a more wholesome place.
Q: It also reveals to us our values. And I wonder where they came from. We start to see how we evaluate things and normally we don’t judge or look at those values, we just take them as read. Now we start going where did that come from? Where did I think that premarital sex was evil or you know, whatever values carry – that friendliness is more important than honesty or whatever. Where did these values come from? So it’s not about changing your values or determining what your values should be. It’s about you examining them, what they are and whether or not they’re yours, or whether you’re just kind of repeating something you’ve heard. And so this is where the meditation gets a bit scary. Because in this process you’re going to run into the ‘four fears’.
CS: These are the four deep ego fears. You’ve heard them, but we’ll go through them again so that everybody can recognize them if they sneak up on you. So fear of abandonment: “He doesn’t love me!” Fear of annihilation: “He’s smothering me!” Fear of insanity. Kind of every drug trips downside. And fear of being evil, which is often incognito as fear of being a bad person.
Q: Which by the way, just by way of a lead in comes from the Shadow – where your mom and dad basically tell you, if not in words they do it by implication, that if you do not behave the way we want you to behave, you’re a bad person, meaning we’ll withdraw our love. Now the parent never says that, the parent never says “I will withdraw my love if you don’t act the way I want you to,” but the child feels it as a withdrawal of love. So for them, it is.
CS: Okay so we start seeing how we have hopes and fears that we cling to and how these take us out of the present moment, which is a recipe for losing our bliss. We see how lonely we feel, which we usually distract ourselves from. And we wonder why that is.
Q: So the meditation starts to become a life raft because we start to find the space between these things and as we start to find the space between these things, we get peace, and we get to rest. It gets quiet. It opens up and we start to see “Oh this meditation state actually feels way better than this neurotic state I’ve been wrestling with”. So at first it seems random or that you have no control over it. But as you get good at it and you program that state into your subconscious by saying “Oh this is better than that,” you start to build the muscle that the subconscious starts to feed it back to you: “Oh no, I’m going to give you this meditation state rather than this anxiety. I’m going to give you this altered state rather than that worry.” And that’s how you get Awakened – is that you tell the subconscious mind that that’s what you’re doing, and when the subconscious mind believes you, because you’re intent on it, it starts feeding it back to you and you start to get altered states or calm, bliss and clarity regularly. Even though monster land.
CS: This is the beginning of what we call happiness. It’s really based on letting go of unwholesome things rather than accumulating things that we like. So the beginning of happiness and also of resilience. We know that we’re the agents of our own states. If I’m feeling bad it’s because I’ve somehow made that choice. And the awesomeness of that is that also means I have the choice and ability to choose a better state. It doesn’t just happen.
Q: No, it doesn’t just happen. Which is why the word karma also is the word cetana, and cetana is decision or intention. So like any habit, if you want to change the habit you need the intention but you also need to put it to work. And that’s what meditation is. It’s a subtle process. It takes time. It takes a lot of time for most people. So we need to support our lives off the cushion as well as on the cushion. And one way you can do that is to ‘meditate on the fly’. Meditate on the toilet, meditate at the grocery store, meditate in bed whether you’re alone or with someone else. Meditate when you’re not engaged in a situation where your mind requires your attention to be on something else which is probably a good state. Like if you’re meditating on a chainsaw then you’re in a good state right? You’re paying attention, you’re focused. It’s when we’re in our leisure time that we get into all the trouble.
CS: Ironically. So we are super excited. Basically, we have co-created Clear Sky Retreat Center to facilitate this process, to help whoever is here to be able to ‘meditate on the fly’ and by extension, through Zoom to you guys, to whoever’s on Zoom. So we do think of it as a contemporary monastery that’s adapting to all the changes in modern life and our modern lifestyles as well.
Q: And why we put so much emphasis on the spiritual container that you see – if you know the five principles of Clear Sky.
CS: And we love taking that on the road.
Q: Yes we’ll be in Europe, hopefully, next year to see the outer world, like Leningrad and so on.
CS: So basically what we’re trying to do is cultivate a really powerful probiotic with billions of probiotic microorganisms and then wherever we go, wherever our Sangha members go, our intention is to bring that probiotic with us and hopefully start a new culture with people who’d like to do that.
Q: So what is the purpose of meditation? First is to calm you down and develop calm and concentration. Then light a fire under it. So this fire can go in two directions. It can go to exalted states called jhanas or samadhis. Or it can go to insight depending on how it’s getting directed. And that’s either samatha or Vipassana. Samatha is calm and concentration leading to bliss. And Vipassana is insight based on questioning.
CS: Let’s just reiterate again that the calm and the clarity are the ground, that’s the basis. And then from there, we explore consciousness further.
Q: So for instance, the word samatha means to collect or to bring together. So in samatha you’re collecting or bringing together the disparate parts of your consciousness. You’re getting your body calm, you’re bringing your emotions into calm, you’re bringing your mental state into calm, you’re bringing it together – it’s like mixing a cake. So it’s often called concentration, sometimes unification of mind, ekagatta, if you want the Pali. And it’s also associated with the term samatha, samadhi – they’re related. Samatha means calm abiding. So being in a calm state.
CS: So all this Sanskrit – if you feel like it’s kind of going in one ear and out the other, don’t worry about it because we all start out that way and it’s just that you’ll hear it more and more and you’ll start to recognize the words. We’re partly just wanting people to get exposure to the language.
Q: Yes absolutely. And like anything, it has its own language to define things in the same way that medicine or chemistry or cooking would. You know, the language is a bit of a part of it. So then its sister term is jhana, J H A N A and it literally means meditation, but it’s usually associated with the blisses. So the development of bliss on the samatha side. But jhana comes from the root jhayate which means birth and now, which means no, which is where Sanskrit really gets interesting because if you put jhana together, you get ‘no birth’ In other words, the mind’s not moving, the mind is not giving birth to another thought. The mind’s not giving birth to a new sensation and feeling – you’re resting in the stillness of the mind which produces the bliss and clarity and non-clinging that removes the suffering.
CS: And nirvana is freedom from reincarnation right? So that’s basically what this is referring to. The mind is not just going around and around and around.
Q: So this kind of jhana or jhayate or samadhi or whatever is in contra poise to just book knowledge. So this jhana is also the root for knowing, jna knowledge, jna knowledge becomes knowledge in English. And this is the knowledge that we think of it as usually book knowledge, it’s stuff we’ve read or stuff we’ve learned, stuff we watched or heard. But here jhana is is the knowing of an experience internally in your system, of common clarity and absorption that you can’t get from a book.
CS: So this is the direct experience which is so important because you know for yourself that it is true, you’re not just going based on what somebody else has said. And so when someone asks you about it, you can really answer with confidence because it is really fully in your organism.
Host: We hope you enjoyed this episode. Please rate and review dharma if you dare on your favorite podcast app to help more people find and benefit from these teachings and don’t forget to subscribe to get episodes and bonus content sent directly to your device. Although Planet Dharma also incorporates study, service and integrating the Shadow into its approach, as you heard today Sensei and Qapel are quick to underscore the invaluable benefits of a meditation practice and one of the most powerful experiences available on the spiritual path is the meditation retreat. Each year Planet Dharma offers a number of group retreat options. These span a large number of topics and practices, but each is grounded in transformational, meditative practices. You can learn more and find the retreat to take your practice deeper at www.planetdharma.com/retreat
See you next time and may all our efforts benefit all beings.
