Own Your Attention | Maitreyabandhu & Amalavajra on Amishi Jha

[Music] so welcome to everyone as i say especially welcome to new people really good to everyone that's new or new to these seminars um what we're doing with the nature of mind we're exploring the nature of mind um from a whole range of perspectives from neuroscience to psychology to past life memories to near-death experiences and tonight we're going to be particularly exploring the work of amishi ja who is a neuroscientist and is she she is yes and we're going to be um did uh the conversation with yeah so i'm going to particularly asking him questions about what she thinks what she feels and then we're going to watch at some point we'll watch a clip from their conversation we'll also have the obligatory short tea break um we're going to uh uh who what we're going to do we're going to review the nature mind we're going to review the program of brit and um introduce davey to you who's going to be leading the meditations next week a week our of our final week of year of online meditations um but yeah let's start with oh there's a question we're gonna have q as well questions and answers in the second half more about the highlights for the from from the centurion so this is um i'm a veteran i have a very good friend for a long long time since you were a boy i'm sorry yeah so um uh when did you interview i can't remember now most couple of months ago yeah so for you do you watch the interview but obviously not now um but you know um we'll be po if we can post a link to the uh editorial conversation that'd be great so what we're going to do today is just hear a little bit about um the kind of areas that you're exploring and then um do go back to what if you haven't watched it already do go back and watch the interview here so i thought we'd we'd start with just me some basically asking you what here we go we've got the book here um yes big mine um can you see it there you go um she was very very engaged yeah a very very engaging uh really lovely woman so i thought we'd just start with say again you say something about her core i did what what do you think about her core ideas yes um i mean the subtitle of the book is is 12 i mean i'm sure for publicity purposes but was peak mind 12 minutes a day to find your focus meet the challenge and be fully present when it matters most find your focus meet the challenge and be fully present when it matters most so what she's particularly interested in is how to in a way not try and escape life's challenges and find a bit of me time that's definitely not her approach it's life is inevitably challenging uh how do we live that life but in a way that um is likely to be more if you like fruitful we're going to be able to sustain ourselves sustain our awareness our attention systems as she calls them while explaining what she means by attention systems um so that actually yeah she says we can meet that challenge um not shirk it as we know very few people actually want to go and live in the mountains and be a helmet all of us uh have you know uh sort of engaged energetic lives how do we live that life whilst also being uh in a sense operating at a a peak level of awareness so i think that's her main her main thinking she's very much she's very pragmatic she's not a philosopher she's not in a way she's not particularly speculative about the nature of the brain most of her work is based on large-scale studies with people living very demanding lives particularly soldiers um what she calls in america they call first responders so paramedics and firefighters and that sort of thing and she's been studying the effect of meditation mindfulness on them and on their effectiveness not just i mean their happiness but also their their effectiveness we also know you had asked a little bit question about about being you know mindfulness assault for soldiers yes i did yes mindfulness to i'm helping soldiers kill people yeah yeah yeah yeah should i answer that question why don't you because yeah i'm meant to ask you but of course i did ask her um yeah actually i thought her answer was very good she said um i don't know whether to talk to you or to the camera um uh she said yeah she was interesting she said yeah of course she you know she doesn't want uh to promote violence you know she's accepted she's been born in underbar which is where um gandhi uh had one of his actually his main ashram and sort of non-violence or ahixa but was very much part of her upbringing so it's not certainly not that she wants to promote violence at the same time this is a world with warfare it is a world with armies and her strong point to me was well you know she's talking to 18 year olds 19 year olds who've got a weapon that can destroy a whole town would we rather that 18 year old is a bit self aware he's calm is kind of you know in a way emotionally regulated when they're operating up that weapon or not and of course the answer is is we'd much rather that she even said maybe one could ask more about she even said that um yeah the the the soldiers really um uh kind of really valued this on a human level it actually made them have more empathy for um their opponents i'm not quite sure how that works out when the general really does say pull the trigger but anyway and she said in another interview that the what we would talk about as loving kindness meditations were their favorite meditations yeah that was easily the favorite one so really surprising in that regard but guess what soldiers are human things just like us and they of course want to feel connected to other to other living beings so yeah so quite an interesting answer i thought from there on that i mean she tells a lovely story about we won't do it now because of all the take up time but do you have a look and she tells a very touching story about a particular soldier who through mindfulness actually managed to avert yeah horrors rather the air calls me so they don't too long but i thought for some people that might be that's probably about right from the beginning um so let's you know she talks about these um three attention systems be good to sort of what is an attention system and then what are those three and then what value was that for us in a way yeah i mean it's a final phrase isn't it attention system i mean basically i think she's talking about awareness like what are the three aspects of awareness um of the mind well in a way it's her answer to what is the nature of mind i guess you could say and she she comes up these three kind of um aspects or three modes the flashlight the floodlight and the juggler uh or you could say the ceo the executive um so i know some of you would have watched the interview so i won't go exhaustively but for those of you who haven't watched into the uh the flashlight is very much the path of awareness that focuses that focuses on a very particular often actually a very particular area of space or inner space yeah that's very sort of in a way narrowly focused on on something that it an object that we that's important to us yeah so i mean in evolutionary terms you can imagine sort of primitive man or woman kind of focusing on a berry bush to get berries to eat you know like that that's the focus like that's what that's what you need right now um the floodlight actually is a much broader awareness that's um and that's much more kind of alert to what's happening right now including danger so to go back to that berry bush it would be the snap of a twig over there that might be a you know a sort of a threat a creature um [Music] yes it's much broader awareness much broader ways um awareness and context i mean i did wonder she wasn't very interested in talking about the hemispheres the brain but for those of you who were interested in the who watched liam gilchrist i did wonder if there was some kind of connection with the left brain being the more focused part and the right brain being the breath more about breadth and context other people that sort of thing um although it seems very hard to talk about these two half of the brain without getting it wrong so yeah and she didn't really want to go there if you saw the interview she didn't really want to go there so um i made the point of how often just in a way uh layman's understandings are wrong about the hemisphere so yeah and then the juggler uh or the ceo is the one who's who um is kind of monitoring uh goals you know trying to say okay what's our priority right now what's our goal right now um so i mean for those of you buddhists i thought those first two you could think of as what we call sati you know that for those who did mindfulness of breathing or breathing meditation you're definitely focusing on the breath that's that first attention system you're focusing on the breath but you've also got breadth awareness you've also got awareness of the body and the broader sense of yourself so you've got focus and breadth um whereas the the the juggler or the ceo that sort of executive decision making saying right now we're going to focus on this that's more we call san virginia or continuity of purpose what is the priority right now when we sit down to meditate on the breath that's what we do that's our decision that's what the ceo the juggler is saying that's what we're going to focus on we're not going to think about that trip holiday whatever we're going to come back so yeah so those are the three modes of mode of attention that she yeah that she's delineated if you like and we'll come back to it as we start to talk about how awareness can go wrong and how it can go right but yeah just to give you the sort of the alliance and then the other thing that we should talk about with this invoker uh yes sounds like your character for buddhists i'll recognize the word but it's actually voca yes i thought i thought let's say a little bit about what she was saying about vodka which i thought was interesting um apparently again it comes out of this world of first responders as they call in america uh uh it's when he got a volatility uncertainty uh complexity and ambiguity volatility uncertainty complexity and ambiguity um so of course people in the in the sort of first responder world you know if you're you know responding to a car crash or a building a fire or a firefight in afghanistan obviously those are very heightened that's a very heightened experience of looker um all four of those i guess um but actually her point was that's true for all of us you know all of us in all of our lives we face those kind of scenarios i mean she gave me the point of course the last two years of covered lockdowns and pandemic generally have been a collective experience of vucker you know uncertainty what you know what's going to happen next um very complex what i'm able to do how am i going to living yeah very very volatile and is my life in danger and my friend's life with my family you know so but also you could say exposure to you know 24 24 hours um to uh and all the alarms you know if you if like me you're checking the news on ukraine every day that's not gonna kind of calm the mind that's an experience of kind of complexity and ambiguity and uncertainty what will come next you know so um but also just busyness as well you know everyone's looking very busy life so and and just the internal auto can have internal real character like just if you know if you're if you're ruminating a lot on difficulties or or kind of um speculating about how things can go wrong in your life that's your sort of internal looker which yes does does kind of connect with what we call dukkha or suffering in buddhist suffering um and there's three levels of dukkha three levels of suffering in buddhism so yeah i thought that that was very interesting and she was talking about the effect the problem of vocal and and so i'll just say what she was saying about the effect on those three attention systems using her model um in those so basically it makes our it weakens our awareness it it weakens our ability to make the decisions to be happy to be emotionally regulated to be creative and in the extreme you know your that flashlight uh if you imagine literally a flashlight or torch in a dark alley it means it's very uncertain it's unsteady it won't just stay in one spot keeps moving around if you're if you're in a vocal situation um or it just gets fixated on one one this spot um that's often how depression is sustained is because one just gets fixated on a particular particular thought and likewise the unsteady one might be in an extreme like the case of adhd um yeah um [Music] the floodlight uh that would be you know when that's going wrong that would be a kind of state of hyper-vigilance like you're just always on alert for what might go wrong next um rather than just just a relaxed background sense of the environment um so again an extreme that would be anxiety or even ptsd um and then the floodlight uh sorry i just said that then the uh the ceo the juggler yeah you just in that scenario you just kind of lose touch with your your your goals you know your actions don't align with your goals anymore with your intentions in fact i've got a story from today right today yeah i mean in my very minor sort of first world kind of problems in a way well i just i was traveling up here to um to to do the of course to the seminar traveling up to london from somerset and i and i really wanted to power spray the patio before i left we've all been there we've all been there right that's covered in master we're going to get rid of it right and so i had to do it today because my partner's getting i promised i'd do it she's getting about today i've got to do it right so i get the sprayer out and plugged in got the water coming and i'm spraying the patio with a sense of pressure because i've got a train to catch so i've got to get this done quickly and and so very focused so they're all flashlights there right literally kind of on on each square of the patio spraying off the um the mold and um i'm really focused on that the co is very clear i've got to do this by my train at five to two i've got to get this done and um but uh something about this sort of stress of that situation um i didn't notice that the the hose had come on become separate from the unit and so water was actually pouring into the hallway of the house and uh i didn't notice that so my kind of my uh floodlight wasn't really operating because i was just so fluked on this thing so then i turned around and um uh yeah the hallway was kind of a little little pond that formed so um i mean a very silly example but i thought a case where in a way that pressure of not having enough time to do the job meant basically i just wasn't i've lost awareness decision which actually meant it will take longer of course sponging out all the water anyway um so yeah i mean that's a minor sort of first world type um uh issue but you you and maybe it helps illustrate um anyway so then she and then of course she talked about what to do about vodka don't forget that yeah let's go on to watch because it is rather important too about it well yeah because it's it's just to go through what the acronym stands for again just in case we wouldn't get it because okay volatile uncertain yeah um what was it complex complex and ambiguous yeah i sometimes think what does the a stand about how big it is yes um well yeah her main point i thought this is one of the most interesting things that amisha jar is saying is don't even think about trying to um avoid like i say that i mean interestingly enough although we talked about the sort of crisis of attention she wasn't particularly interested in talking about switch off your devices get off social media she wasn't actually particularly interested in that and she certainly wasn't interested in as i say sort of give up your job and somehow you know live in the mountains which is unrealistic um for most of us uh what she's actually saying is that okay so if vucker is degrading our awareness or attention systems and she says well what are we going to do about that because the rna is that we need behind awareness to deal with to deal with with the difficulty and yet it's degrading it so we've got a problem there so um excuse the analogy of actually uh it's like a fuel tank your your awareness is like a fuel tank you've either got a kind of a reserve of of um of awareness or you haven't um and well obviously therefore the thing to do is to to find ways to top up that reserve of of um of of awareness as we would call it so that you can meet those challenges [Music] so for those of you out there who do meditate daily good news because basically in a way her scientific research is saying that is exactly what you need to be doing and she's i say done all these studies with uh soldiers and and got definitive evidence that people who meditated daily uh at least for five days a week i think it was did considerably better in the field in war zones or as firefighters whatever they were doing uh did considerably better made better decisions they stayed more emotion buoyant and more creative if they had a daily practice and in fact even if they were only meditating for 12 minutes a day absolutely that's the minimum yeah anything less actually doesn't make any difference basically so she did say more is better she was really clear about that that doesn't mean just do 12 minutes but but and that's now what they teach the gis to do is do 12 minutes a day yeah they realized ask them to half an hour stupid because they end up doing nothing so they said no do the 12 minutes and some people because they get right into it and do more so that was the first thing um and interestingly the practices that that she's training these people in like pretty close to what we're doing uh for those of you involved in triathlon mindfulness breathing basically um uh loving kindness meditation what we call metabath um they're the main two practices um there is another one which uh is the other thing she's suggesting she talks about meta awareness cultivating meta awareness and this is basically like a sort of in a way awareness aware of itself so your mind looking at it at itself if you like um in a way it's quite an advanced practice in in buddhism you know mahmoud chen or something but this is what she's also teaching people to do so like a sense of what is the state of my of my mind right now really kind of that's what there's my meta like looking almost from above like what is the state of my mind right now and that's been very effective for example in dealing with depression um and that's something we can do in daily life you know any time in the day we can just kind of just get hold what's what is the state of my mind right now oh okay yeah it's getting a bit tight a bit stressed yeah bit overwhelmed so and the other thing she talks about is de-centering um and that's a kind of a disidentification with with the mental state that you see um i'll probably talk about that too much um and yet her findings were that that these kind of practices will strengthen um your retention systems uh your awareness so that you're much better able to remain happy and creative and so forth in but certainly very extreme situations like that but obviously for those of us who aren't firefighters or paramedics likewise even those are some massive challenges like overweight lunchtime [Music] yes well it didn't work i didn't meditate this morning maybe that's that's why you guys that's what went wrong yeah yeah and then we're gonna we're gonna show a clip in a minute just a little bit of a clip from the um from the conversation and then we'll after that we'll have a bit of a take break in a minute but never ask the questions but um on my list here i've got mind wandering positive and negative i've forgotten what we meant by oh this is i found this really this is the highlight for me um in a way if one's already meditated then what i've just talked about is just kind of good news oh great i'm on the right track um this bit was really interesting so she talks about mind wandering which [Music] in negative and positive terms so negatively this is when we're trying to do a task uh like for example focusing on the breath but it could be writing a paper or an email an important email and you just your mind just keeps wandering off the tasks we're all familiar with this you're not present may be getting lost in thought as i was saying earlier rumination um catastrophizing and what she was saying is is what you're doing is you're kind of in that moment you're kind of overloading what she calls the sort of white board of the mind the memory of the mind it's just getting loads of thought loads of you know what we call distraction the whiteboard if you're not just filling up really filling up and um and it could also be because of vocal stuff you know just getting filled with stimulation and and thoughts about that stimulation um but also uh just just through just too much activity just constant activity you know if one is just constantly active from morning till night especially focus on tasks you know trying to be really productive actually that's overloading your um your sort of uh whiteboard and you're actually going to find it harder to focus harder to concentrate your mind's going to wonder i'm sure you'll know from your own experience and that's going to lead to errors uh emotional reactivity you're obviously you can have less patience for people less patience with yourself and this was really quite solitary you're not going to remember your life yes i was really really struck by this that actually memories are formed from that if you like that mental whiteboard is is where memories are formed from or to put it on their way she said attention is is your daughter is the doorway to memory memories are encoded from that and if you're whiteboards your short term memory is completely full all the time there's that gateway there's no there's no way through that doorway that makes my metabolic doorways it's kind of blocked um and i found that really interesting and i said in the interview though certainly my experience from living habitually a very full life from morning till night even as a meditator i have to say even as a meditator um fine i meditate first in the morning but then if i'm just full on the rest of the time then yeah i don't actually have a very good memory of experiences in my life and that's a very strong pattern so i was very struck by that the story wasn't far with us well one of the officers from the army who just didn't remember his children a lot of big chunks of his children his childhood and there were photos he's there in the photo but he doesn't remember and it wasn't that he forgot they somehow they can tell it wasn't he forgot he just because he wasn't present he didn't make the memory and what's more this was the very strong point there's a takeaway if you're not present you lose it you can't create the memory later you have to be present in the moment otherwise it's lost um apparently again this is all proven with brain science so i thought that was very interesting and this is all in the negative mind warning basically that guy's mind was on other stuff he's there with his children but he's not really with him because he's worrying about i don't know probably army stuff or whatever you know work problems so therefore he doesn't he's not present he doesn't remember it's quite strong i was very strong i thought it was very striking that if you're not present you don't remember things and how much the the experience we all have over so much of what's life flowing away from one yeah there is there is there is positive mind wandering and this is the answer though as well so there is an antidote there is hope i mean obviously those other things we talked about should help um but the big one she talks about is intentional mind wandering and this is positive mind running where it's intentional and what she means by this is completely task free time where you're not making any demands on those three attention systems none you're not trying to focus on anything you're not trying to achieve anything you're not trying to be alert to anything you're just not trying to think and and a lot of us would tend when we want to break we might sit what i would do anyway go and look at the news oh how how's uh emma radakani doing at wimbledon that would be my idea of relaxing that doesn't count i'm afraid that's a task we're looking at social media that doesn't count as a task it's got to be just completely kind of let doing nothing basically just letting the mind just wander just go for a walk just look out the window um it's the kind of stuff we all know we should do more of that she's got scientific proof that that is what's needed that's what lets the whiteboard clear that this ink that's on the whiteboard it does does disappear it does it's vanishing it but it has to you have to give it time and i mean the biggest example of this would be of course going on retreat i was on retreat last week and i was quite disciplined i didn't read anything i just if i had time to meditations as i did i just sat around doing nothing and it's very hard initially but wow you know there's a real recharge of the that fuel tank of it of awareness and um uh i think i remember it pretty well doing this one a week later but anyway so i i did ask about boredom because that's the main reason often we don't want to do that kind of thing or we've just got such a momentum of drive and restlessness that it's just hard to just put the brakes on um and she said yeah well you know this you see that board and take that as a sign to okay it's uncomfortable but just take that as a kind of notification okay i've got a choice though how i respond i don't have to respond to boredom by just straight back onto the phone i can just work with this and you know it's been talked about uh in buddhist circles there's boredom being like a a dragon that guards treasure but it's a kind of a and that treasure being real depth of mind um so there are yeah there is treasure to be found but you do have to i have to and maybe you do too work with that real resistance to just do nothing i mean it isn't because we've been you know introverted we've been teaching the value of doing nothing for ages but there is something a bit helpful about having a bit yes okay then you really do need to do that that is really good let's um yeah let's have a look you know we've been talking a lot about the conversation so let's have a little let's watch the clip from the a clip that chose um and see this is a whole other area which i was right there and i found really fascinating um even the brain basis at this point is is sort of less central to my work than um than understanding just if there are benefits and how to benefit people from this work there are aspects of what my lab does that's that's very interested in brain function but it's really on the level of understanding the nature of how mental states proliferate so it get gets into a little bit of an esoteric sort of buddhist terrain of the contingent nature of reality and you know if if if one moment in time really sets the stage for the next moment in time um and what what what happens in moments you know n plus one is really determined by what just happened a moment ago um how does it look like how does that look in the brain and what we realize is the brain too is sort of a contingent organ and we do this using eeg so we're not just looking at like um you know larger time windows we're looking at these thousands of seconds something called microstates and what we see is that microstates actually have this sort of contingent nature so i'm very interested in that aspect of it but it has to do more with mind wandering and attention more so than its hemispheric nature and what that i mean that's really pink mind just what you just said about the this contingent reality of the brain um i mean what did do you see a difference in the brains of people who are really well either very experienced meditators or even i mean i don't know how you would measure wisdom but you know uh people who who would attain quite deep wisdom or insight into the into the contingent nature of reality you could say i mean goodness knows how you would measure that but is there anything that you can sort of see objectively through an ecg yeah you know i would say this is i'm now commenting on the broader field of contemplative compliance and yes we are learning a lot about this what we know for example is that there is there's not so much about this contingent state that that has happened very good but just to say in broad strokes yes long-term practitioners um have particular nodes in their brain that have increased what's called cortical thickness you can almost think about it as like certain muscle groups are stronger because they're working them out that's right way of thinking about it we know that interconnection between certain brain networks is better the dynamics are smoother and you know we talked about mind wandering we know what the brain network that really is involved in mind wandering or this internally directed attention and with long term and even short term practice you can see that activation in that network something called the default mode network which is actually multiple sub networks it can get dialed down so we see things are making sense like the thing that's part of the training is showing up in the way that the brain looks um this question that i'm talking about really is not even about contemplative training it's about just the nature of how the brain operates so if you know that there's a particular micro state you know configuration of neurons that are showing you ah there's stability almost a mind moment if you will and that mind moment by mind moment configuration um has a temporal contingency it's likely to be the same and so if you're in state one in these microstates you're likely to be in state one in the next moment and the chances of you flipping to a different state are lower than you staying in the same state and flipping the certain specific states is even lower so like to go from a very focused state to a completely open state variance ah right you might go from a little less focus but going from focus to totally unconstrained very unlikely so this is how i think it actually relates to some of some very interesting buddhist concepts of even what it means to have long-term practice in terms of you're tethering to mental contingency so for example if you think about what um you know i'm now totally speculating but if you think about what enlightenment is you know to be truly free what does that look like in terms of a brain configuration one hypothesis may be you you are you don't need to have those contingencies you can go from state highly focused to totally not focused um you can go to any dimension with ease and without any kind of compulsion to be tied into what's going on you know you know we don't know but um it would be interesting to see even how contemplative practice long term or short term impacts the contingencies between these microstates as a way to understand more fundamentally how practicing frees us in some sense yes but let's say a little bit about that and then just see whether there's any questions and then real little breaks and what struck you about that why did you choose that well it's funny it's classic i just felt towards that end of the conversation she obviously really wanted to talk about enlightenment and it was fascinating the idea of scanning the brain of a buddha or somebody their enlightenment and just being able to to see um to see that in a brain scan to see that sort of as she says non-contingent nature i mean we talk about um conditions arising don't we that that phenomena arise out of other conditions and that matches what she's saying about the brain the brain doesn't you don't just suddenly find itself in a particular mental state that arises out of conditions and that can actually be seen on a scanner which is fascinating and a buddha's brain who's which is unconditioned by say greed hatred and delusion uh how interesting that if you could actually see that on a scanner i mean i suppose let's say even if you could so what but i guess maybe if that could start to um what would be the benefit of that i suppose if you could start to sort of i don't know see what kind of practices help you towards that state maybe you could try different meditations whilst having the scanner and see what kind of meditation to free their mind i don't know it would be a extreme example of how mental states actually create mind literally actually you rewire your brain for you yes so it's not just the brain create consciousness but creates that that's another question but the concept of meditators yeah that that's i guess well well well attested to isn't it it actually changes your brain yeah that's interesting it's interesting so let's see but see let's see if anyone's got any questions um about either you know you might have watched amish's conversation with amici or just what uh has been saying just now let's just see if there's any questions perhaps either either type them into youtube um not youtube and to zoom or um yeah we could or put your hand up and we can unmute you you have to hear a few other voices we won't spend a lot of time with questions because i want to in the second half after our break i want to do a bit of a review of the whole of the lecture of mind project because we can start to look back now what the highlights have been but let's just see what there's any any questions here so you can put your hand up or you put them in the text does anyone uh we've got a crew here who are looking for your questions you may or may not have them [Music] um number one here um yes i've got a question about the um the positive and negative mind wandering oh yes um which i found very intriguing and my recollection of what you are saying is that the main difference was the extent to which we were on task or not so it's negative if we have a task that we're not as it were following yeah and it's relative if we don't have a task um which i found that well it's very pragmatic distinction isn't it um and what's the question it's i suppose i'm less convinced that there's such a difference in quality or maybe that's the question is there a difference in quality between positive and negative mind-body or um it feels to me like this is is there another distinction between as it were reactive and creative mind wandering oh that's interesting yes yeah i mean so you're you're you're quoting saying garage to distinction between reactive and creative um yeah i mean i think that would be a perfectly good way of just making the distinction i guess in the first case what she's calling negative mind wondering then uh yeah in a way you've got a task you're trying to do and you're [Music] you're kind of reacting to it as part of it doesn't want to do it you're bouncing off it you're bouncing off i mean i think you've slightly had that on the train today preparing for tonight like you know checking the tennis so so you know i'm familiar with that kind of slightly reactive and slightly unconscious response um whereas yeah the more creative creative mind wandering i guess would be yeah much more intentional much more conscious where you're saying actually and this is what i did on the train actually actually i just need a bit of a break actually i think this is i'm taking this as a sign that i need to take a break from preparing for this interview and just look out the train window for a look at the countryside and i even i mean this is kind of loft but i even have a timer on my watch or my phone i just said it my current number is 12 minutes and i just and i say right i'm really strict i'm not going to look at my phone i'm not going to try and work for the next four minutes i'm just going to sit and look around the train carriage look out the window and and just bear the board and usually comes in about eight minutes and and just do it so um yeah i think that is that is a a decent framing of it um so and yeah i think there is a qualitative difference in a way there's definitely one is fairly unconscious just kind of flipping and the other one is yeah much more conscious and like no i'm gonna i'm gonna face this i'm gonna i'm gonna actually do something on my initiative to try and face this mental state i mean yeah it's interesting because which is mind-wandering really um it's always negative i think right i don't think there's any conception of it because one of the epithets of the buddha is mispropulsion no propulsion um so he seems not to have to go back to the buddha's brain that that kind of highly acceptable propulsion is a bit it's sort of like rumination which is sort of driven associative thinking um he doesn't seem to have had driven associated thinking because it there must be a positive version of it though because partly it's my only experience trying to write a poem for instance you are trying to sort of let your mind wander but you're trying to it's a bit more there's a there's an english word for it [Music] yeah you're trying to there you know there's a way in which the wandering mind at best is connect because propulsive connects this the past with the present the future with the you know this thing without thing but there does seem to be a sort of positive version of it which we used to call reverie where this apparently just not connected things are shown to be connected and that certainly it might mean some writing at times even the most even what appears to be a distraction or even just looking out the window suddenly what you see i had a moment the other day where i was writing something and looked after the train window something i see was immediately in the poem and seemed to be needed so yeah i mean i i don't i'm not sure what the buddha would think about something you should write both it does make me wonder if there's a kind of a positive associative thinking that is actually a different way of thought where you're you're you're bringing apparently disparate of things together into actually a thought but without having to think about it with that are you not trying to think what am i trying to think yeah that's right you're being led by association yeah you know i mean metaphor is an association anyway i don't know why i think that but that was my thought on that seems to be a sort of positive version of a function but there's no i can't think of an example in the party that suggests it seems to always think of it well we do have the practice of just sitting and that's recommended isn't it yes you do a period of focused practice on the breath or on loving kindness and then you have a period of just sitting where you you know certainly our teachers anger actually says well you just sit you don't try and do anything just he's very strict about not giving any teaching on it yeah um but let's see if there's anything thanks very much for that let's see if there's any other uh questions and then one other thing before i tear it and um you know did you say the reason why i can't no it was in another interview that i listened to on on a podcast actually and it come up in the context of um i think the guy was asking about masculinity actually i think that the podcast guy was saying well you know it's hard to imagine these soldiers mainly men being interested in meditation really and she said yes not only are they well into the meditation they particularly love the loving kindness practice so so there you go but no she didn't she didn't hazard as to why that that would be free um that i remember um yeah in terms of this other question maybe we need to list out the five hindrances for those who don't know them you can ask me to do that told me not to say very much no i didn't say that i just wanted to get a word in actually you've hardly said anything from you as well [Music] well restlessness anxiety sense desire sloth and torpo uh ill will and doubt thank you doubt any decision is it absolutely doubt indecision here so those so your question robert is is there an equivalent somehow between those five um [Music] uh i don't doesn't don't think i think she's talking more about i mean she was talking about internal mental states it's true she wasn't she said she was very clear it's not just the world it's not just the fire fight or the emergency in the hospital um it can be internal as well so maybe there's some crossover there um or at least on the internal side you know like what's what's our response to life yeah actually yes so what's our response to life we might just get very restless and anxious you know we're in the pandemic we were in the paddock okay just getting into a state of restlessness and anxiety finding it hard to just sit still worrying about the future yeah fair enough that would be internal vucker actually don't think about it yeah yeah according to my timing so yeah you

Channel: Adhisthana Triratna

Views: 408

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Id: eE8qubK-Ack

Length: 45min 5sec (2705 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 06 2022