Ep. 123 - Joseph’s Story

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Welcome to the Joseph Goldstein Inside Hour. This podcast is an expression of our shared interest in self-discovery. Join Joseph as he shares his deep knowledge of the path of mindfulness. If you are interested in supporting this podcast, please go to BeHereNowNetwork.com slash Joseph.

Tonight I'd like to share with you some of the experiences in my own practice, both to give an idea of the range of things that arise in long-term practice. Perhaps to give some kind of perspective to your own experience here. My first interest in Dharma really began at the university.

was at Columbia in New York studying philosophy. Even then, without any formal introduction or knowledge of Buddhadharma, Buddhism, there was... A real sense of philosophical inquiry, wanting to find out somehow some deeper understanding of what my life was all about. And tuning in to a lot of the dharma that's in Western philosophy and literature, but not finding too many people, too many of the professors, who had much sense of that.

For them, it was a pretty academic study. It was fairly frustrating, actually, trying to touch the Dharma in Western philosophy and literature. without having a teacher or a professor who was actually living it themselves. So after four years of that, I was quite ready to leave the academic scene. I applied to the Peace Corps. That was just a year or two after it had been established. And I applied to go to East Africa because I had this image and vision of myself.

of going off to the wilds of Africa and climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, very Hemingway-like. And it was a very romantic image in my mind, and I thought that would be great. You know, leave Columbia, leave Manhattan. Get out to the jungle Fortunately in a way the Peace Corps decided that I really wasn't suited for East Africa

And they sent me to Thailand instead, which turned out to be a very fortunate karmic unfolding. And we were in training, the Peace Corps training. The director came over to our group, came to the training. Center in America, and was listing the different possibilities for assignments in Thailand. And most of them were teaching, the group I was in was learning how to teach English as a second language.

Most of the assignments were teaching English in small secondary or teacher training schools out in the countryside. There were a few special assignments which he... outlined and wanted to see if there were any volunteers for. One of them was to teach English at the most exclusive private school in Bangkok. It's called the King's School, and it was right opposite the palace. I immediately raised my hand. By then, the illusions of climbing Kilimanjaro had faded, and this one sounded quite ideal.

And as it turns out, I got that assignment. And so for two years, I spent in Bangkok. It was at this very, very wonderful place. It was beautiful. classical Thai architecture, and it was set in a beautiful campus. There were lots of servants around. I had cooks and people to do my clothes, and it was wonderful. I loved it. Not very...

much the Peace Corps image of going out and saving the world. In addition to how much I enjoyed it, it also happened to be just down... the street from quite a famous temple in Bangkok, the Marble Temple. And it happens that there were several Western monks who were leading discussion groups. at that temple. After being in Bangkok about a year, somehow I came to know of it. And having kind of philosophic interest in the Dharma, in Buddhism, I started going to these group discussions.

Actually, the first time I went, I went to see this one English monk, and I went with a copy of Spinoza under my own. He had been my hero at college. I was going to explain Spinoza to this Buddhist monk. That didn't last very long. And as the discussion groups went on, I got really interested in just the teachings of the Buddha, the Dharma. Because of my conditioning in college and that kind of philosophically oriented mind, I was really into asking questions. And there were...

usually 25 or 30 people in this group with a couple of monks teaching. And I would ask incessant questions about the theory and about rebirth and what happens. When you're enlightened and you die, and questions of morality, and is mercy killing okay? And all these kinds of theoretical questions. It got so bad. that when people heard I was going to the meeting they would stop coming. And sometimes I think that karma comes back to me.

But I try to have some patience understanding that quality of mind since it was so predominantly my own. After some time... So somewhat in desperation, the monk who was teaching it said, why don't you learn how to meditate? I thought that might be a good idea. And at that time, this was in 1966. There was nobody I knew that had ever done any meditation and who had practiced it. Not in this country and not even in Asia, in Thailand.

For myself and the people I was hanging out with, it was like a totally new idea. You know, there's something rather mysterious about sitting and meditating. He gave me some instructions of just to watch the breath. Very simple things. We started here, and I went out and I got all kinds of paraphernalia to sit on, and I got a special pad and a cushion, arranged everything just right, got up on my bed, set my alarm clock for five minutes.

You don't want to oversit the first time. It didn't take too long until... I extended it to 20 minutes, 30 minutes. And I was totally fascinated by the whole process. It was the first time that I had, in any systematic way, sat down and tried to look at my mind. Tried to concentrate it. It really aroused tremendous interest and fascination in me. So much so that I would sometimes invite my friends over to watch me meditate. They didn't come back too often.

That was the beginning of my Dharma career. I'm still doing that. Before I left the Peace Corps, I had been teaching there for about two years and was about to come back to America. And about a few weeks before I left, I was sitting with some friends. One of them was reading from a very great Tibetan text, the Tibetan book of the Great Liberation.

And I was sitting just listening to this friend read that particular text. My mind was very concentrated at that particular time by some accident. It just settled in, you know, as it happens sometimes. The mind was very still and concentrated, and in just listening to the words, had a really deep and transforming experience. It was a very deep insight into what that text was about and into the nature of my mind.

And just after that, a couple of weeks, the Peace Corps term ended and I came back to America. I'm by then very inspired to do more practice. That time there wasn't much Dharma being taught in America There was nobody I knew actually who was into meditation practice or places I could go So I went off for about a week

It's a place at Colgate University called Chapel House, which was like a retreat, a non-denominational retreat center. Very beautiful in the country. Went up to this chapel house for a week. and tried to meditate by myself. I didn't really have much background in terms of instruction or understanding of what I was doing, and it got terribly confusing. I was watching my breath.

and chanting Aum, concentrating on my third eye, and just anything I had ever remotely heard of connected with meditation, I kind of put together in this hodgepodge. After a week, I really felt like I was going crazy. There was so much energy happening that I didn't understand. I didn't understand how to deal with it at all. My mind was bouncing off the walls. I realized at that time that...

I really needed a teacher. It was very hard to kind of make this inner journey without some guidance. So I decided to go back to Asia. Originally planning to go back to Thailand, since that's where I had been, but deciding to stop in India on the way, and perhaps to meet some teachers there. India, I went around, went to one...

Sikh ashram. I went looking for some Tibetan teachers. Nothing was really clicking. Went back to Delhi, about to get on a plane to go to Thailand. And I was walking to the... to the airline office to buy my ticket. I was walking down the street, and in one moment, something happened. I still don't understand exactly what it was.

It was some force which stopped me from taking another step. It's just as if I had come against the Colgate invisible shield. And I couldn't go forward. So I decided to go back. And the thought came, actually, at that time, somebody had given me an acid trip. So I thought, well, maybe I'll go to Benares, you know, this Hindu holy city, take this LSD and blow my mind down.

So I go to Benares and very fantastic city. It's like all of India is condensed in Benares. Tremendous kind of energies and excitement. Anyway, I never took the acid there. On the way to the train station, again to go back to Delhi to try to leave the country and go to Thailand, I just had a flash of an intuition to go to boat Gaia.

I had heard from some friends who had been traveling that Bodh Gaya was a very special place. It's where the Buddha was enlightened. It was near Benares, about five hours. But just on the way to the train station, the site...

Go to Bodh Gaya, I'll sit under the Bodhi tree, I'll take my LSD and get enlightened. Get on the train, go to Bodh Gaya. I come to... Come into Bodh Gaya looking for a place to stay and pass by the Burmese Vihara. Vihara just means dwelling place. It's kind of like a monastery. Although it was more for travelers than there was just two Burmese monks who were running it.

And mostly Westerners were staying there. And I go into the Burmese Vihara. There were four Danish people who had been there for some time and had been practicing meditation. with Munindra. And I go and I meet them and they invite me to stay with them. And they start telling me about Munindra and about the meditation. And I get all interested since that's what I've really come for.

Next morning, I go to the class that Munindra had been leading, and there was an immediate tuning in to the practice. Not such a quick tuning into Munindra himself, which took a much longer time. But the way he described the basic Vipassana practice, which is exactly what we've been doing here, made so much sense to me in terms of being very...

Very clean. Seemed like there was nothing extra. Came to the class and Manindra said, sit down, watch your breath, watch your sensations, watch your mind, watch your thoughts. There was no mantra. There was no visualization. There was no cultural overlay onto the basic practice of awareness. I think it was the simplicity and the purity and the directness of the practice that I tuned into very quickly.

And it inspired me to stay there and begin my intensive practice at that time. I never did take that acid trip. Once I got into practice, that's all I wanted to do. The Burmese Vihar, just to give you an idea of the kinds of conditions for practice in India, perhaps to disillusion you a bit. It's interesting. There's a book called the Vasudhimaga, which translated means the path of purification. It's this two-volume, very large book. It's a kind of summary of all the teachings of...

Virtue and concentration and the development of all those powers and wisdom and the different stages of insight. Very huge book. And in it, it describes the perfect place to meditate. It said it should be pretty far from a village and not too close to a road and not nearby a public water tap to really have a quiet, secluded place. The Burmese Vihar was just outside the village of Bodh Gaya, which was a kind of noisy, bizarre town. It was just directly on the road from Bodh Gaya.

to Gaia, which is the next biggest city, trucks and buses and rickshaws and elephants and all day long going back and forth with people yelling and screaming. And just across the street from the entrance to the Bihar was a public water tap. Where all the village women would come and wash their clothes and dishes and gossip. It was so noisy. Didn't matter. Got into my practice, I was... Very glad for a place to have to practice. In India, they often use rope beds. It's like a wooden frame.

with rope back and forth on it, which are actually pretty comfortable. But the one I had, and as most of them were, it was five feet long. It was not quite long enough, right? And just at the end is this big wooden bar. So it wasn't very comfortable just to dangle over. Lots of mosquitoes. And for some reason, that first year I was there...

Although it was very obvious, I didn't tune into the wisdom of buying a mosquito net. So every night, I kind of climb into my sleeping bag with my legs dangling over this bar of wood, wrapped... my head in some, you know, rag or piece of cloth to try and keep the mosquitoes out. It was difficult. It was really hard. The food at the Vihar... For breakfast, we would have japatti, which is like an Indian bread, flatbread, and cabbage and potatoes. For lunch, we would have japatti.

cabbage and potatoes and evening we'd have some tea and a banana about that big and that was the diet every day Cabbage and potatoes and chapati for breakfast or lunch. All day long, it would be so noisy there with the people on the street and the water tap. And I'd wait patiently, you know, all day for it to get to be nighttime and the street noise quiet down so I could meditate. India has been cursed. with the importation of loudspeaker systems.

And it would get to be eight or nine at night. And the villages were all around the Vihar, you know, across from some rice fields. But eight or nine at night, the village people would be done working. They'd want some entertainment. and they would play this Hindi film music on these loudspeakers blaring away till 2, 3, 4 in the morning. There was so much frustration in that.

And yet it was a great teacher. It really forced a kind of opening and accepting and allowing because there was nothing to do about it. And even with all that, with all that kind of external hindrance. I felt so deeply what a blessing it was to have a place where people supported practice. I could have a place that I would sit and be able to sit and walk and be fed regardless of the kind of food. And I had a tremendous appreciation.

When I first began sitting, I had so much trouble with my posture, with the pain of sitting. There was so much pain in my legs that I could not sit cross-legged, like 15, 20 minutes. And that was it. And so I have amazing respect and appreciation for people who come here also who have never sat and just do it because I know how hard it is.

Myself, I started sitting in a chair because it was just too much to be with the pain. How to get a comfortable seat in a chair? I'm pretty big. Most of the chairs are not quite the right height. You know, a little too low for my long legs. So what I did, there was this kind of big chair that I had, kind of a big armchair. I got a wicker cane. And I got some bricks and I put... three or four bricks under each leg. And I set this chair on top of the bricks and my mosquito net over the chair.

And I piled cushions up on the seat of the chair, and I sat as if I was in a kind of shoeshine booth, you know, crabbed up there. I sat that way for a long time. It was actually very embarrassing every time Muninja came. I'm sure he never saw anybody meditating like that. perched up on my throne. It took a long time until the concentration deepened, although it did. I found that actually...

Even though it didn't quite fit the image of being a yogi, it didn't really matter. Just the sitting still was what was important, and it was possible to get good concentration even in that unusual position. One of the things that plagued me in the beginning of practice, and one that's pretty common for people, is the sense of how can I do it better? There must be a way that if I just got the secret of it...

Somehow the practice would deepen more quickly. There must be some trick to it. And I would always go running off to Menindra. Well, isn't there some way I could just do it better to make things happen more rapidly? And I play myself with that kind of judgment of my practice and wanting things to happen for a while until I saw what I was doing to my mind.

I got into a place of surrender. I decided I'm going to put in my hours. That's the effort I can make. Sit and walk and sit and walk and surrender to the Dharma, to the Buddha. Let it unfold by itself. And I found it a very skillful attitude in the sense of letting go of expectations or judgments or evaluations of how you practice it. If you just do it, if you put in your time in a continuous way.

the whole of the Dharma unfolds by itself. It's really a sense of, over a period of time, coming to trust the practice, to trust the Dharma. It's like that line from Chuang Tzu I read the other night about how we don't have to, with our own contriving, to help the Tao along. The Tao, the Dharma, does just fine. And we have to just settle back and get out of the way of it.

so that it can unfold and deepen. The quality of surrender was very helpful, and the perseverance just to do it without a constant comment on it. Perseverance takes different forms. I can't remember whether I mentioned to you or not, but perhaps it's worth repeating anyway. The problem I had was sleepiness.

At one point in my practice, again, getting up real early, we got up at four and sat for a couple of hours before breakfast, and I would get very sleepy. I'd race into the hall to find some wall space. you know, to lean against. And 10 or 15 minutes later, I'd be first asleep. And I started thinking, this is stupid. I might as well stay in bed and get up and breakfast and at least be wide awake.

But I didn't give in to that thought and I kept on getting up and going there and falling asleep until it took about a week or 10 days. One time I went in and I sat down and I was wide awake. Crystal clarity in my mind. And it was a lesson in all that time of going there and falling asleep had not been wasted. If I had kind of given up and stayed in bed, never would have gotten through, never would have broken through that pattern.

So even when you think that nothing's happening and that you're just drowsy, you're falling asleep, the very effort to continue your practice is building up a momentum of awareness, of mindfulness.

And you get through the hindrances in that way. The first time I left India, I practiced for some time and had to come back to America. I was there over a seven-year period, and back and forth to this country a few times for a couple of months, both to visit and to work a little bit. The first time I left... As I was pulling away in the rickshaw, Manindra had come out to say goodbye. And he said something to me, which at the time I heard and...

One level appreciated and another level thought, it's kind of a cliche. But in time over the years of my practice, I've come to appreciate what he said so much and see the truth of it. As I was leaving, he said, the Dharma protects those who protect the Dharma. You see, the more practice you do and the more you open up to the Dharma in your life, that is...

a commitment to being mindful, to being honest, to being aware. The forces of Dharma, the forces of truth, act as a great protection. Which doesn't mean that you no longer go through difficulties, but... that you learn from the difficulties. Instead of wallowing in it and drowning in them, there's a real sense of opening and exploration. There is a tremendous protection in that sense that the Dharma affords. I'd like to speak a little about him tonight. He was a great inspiration to my practice.

But not in any of the usual ways. Because he didn't have any self-image of how a teacher should be. He was very settled back into himself just being Munindra. Just being Muninja didn't fit my image at all of how a teacher should be. And so my mind was always bouncing off the things he would do in judgments and comments. And that doesn't seem very... enlightened, and it was very illuminating to watch my mind in that way. There was one period of my practice when it was getting very deep.

Good concentration, good mindfulness, sitting for three, four, five hours at a time. Really wonderful time in my practice. Meninga had the habit of coming by with every... new Westerners that came to Bodh Gaya, you know, just traveler types, come and meet the Western yogi. And he dragged them off to come and meet me. You know, how are you? Where are you from? How long have you been here?

Real chitchat. Coming out of that deep space of practice, it was so annoying. And I'd be sitting there and hear footsteps coming and praying that it wasn't Munindra with some, you know. New person he picked up. And this is my own teacher that I was relating to. And he's like, please don't come to see me. In retrospect.

I see how valuable a teaching it was. And it wasn't that he was doing it consciously as a teaching for me. He was just being Munindra. It turned out that it was very valuable in the sense that you can't even be attached. to deep practice or stillness or tranquility, that real freedom means the ability to be able to go from a very deeply concentrated state to stand up and meet somebody and chit-chat a little bit without any ripple in the mind.

That's what freedom is about. It's not holding on to any kind of state at all. And it took quite a bit of annoyance and irritation in my own mind until I began to appreciate that. But it's something we all have to work with, especially with Dharma in the West, where most of us don't have forest monasteries to live our lives in.

And we have to relate and interact with lots of people. And to do the practice in as intensive a way as possible and as silent a way, but being very open to getting up from your sitting. and dealing with some business without any disturbance. That was of real value to me. He's not having an image of himself. was so freeing for me. The one story is of a friend who had gone to Calcutta.

and was going back to the train station. She was in this rickshaw with another friend of hers, and they were going through the back streets of Calcutta. And as they were going, this big Indian man... kind of a dark alley, jumped on top of her and pulled her off, started to pull her off. And she was really terrified. There was like no friendly faces on the street.

And somehow out of the fence she was with managed to push this guy off and the rickshaw guy pulled him away and got to the station. She came back to Bodh Gaya and was telling Meningrad's story. And he's... Very curious about everything. He wanted to know all the details and how she was feeling and exactly what had happened. And she goes through this whole story. And at the end of it, Munindra says, oh, dear.

With all the loving kindness in your heart, you should have taken your umbrella and hit that man over the head. And sometimes that's what's required. It's not to have an image. of what it means to be spiritual or holy, sometimes with all the love and kindness in your heart, you have to take your umbrella and wield it. He was very loving. Meningo was not at all an authoritarian figure. He never imposed discipline. He had such a fantastic...

understanding and trust in practice, he knew that it would all come out of the practice itself. And so had a very gentle, very gentle approach. Very mother-like in the way he related to his students. One time when Goenka had started teaching and a retreat was about to start, I had been with Meninga for some time, a few years, and we had a close relationship by that time.

And he was there just as the retreat was going to start, and they were going to kind of lock the gates and keep everybody in for the retreat. It was a big one. There were about 200 people there at the time. He gave me some parting advice. for being at the retreat. This was the first course I had done with Goenka. It's kind of his message to me, you know, in studying with another teacher. Just as he was leaving, he told me, Be sure to be first online for food so it doesn't get cold.

I followed his advice. You may notice I still do. That sense of not having a model. You know, what kind of statement is that? You know, be first online for food. Actually, it came just from a very simple, loving space. Just concerned and had that sense of caring. And he had no self-image, you know, if that's not, you know, a guru's not supposed to say that. He was just himself in the simplest and most natural way. And that quality, more than anything, is what was so inspiring to the practice.

to see that it is possible just to settle back and be natural. No kind of self-images we have to buy into or create or sustain. And it's a very freeing, a very wonderful quality. After some time, I had been back to America once and was going back to India. And I was in, actually I was in Israel, stopping on the way back. I saw a movie.

called Charlie, which is based on the story Flowers for Algernon. Maybe some of you have seen it. It's about a person who's mentally retarded, kind of living in the world, but people are always making a lot of fun of him. playing practical jokes. And then he undergoes this operation and he becomes this experimental operation. He becomes brilliant. And he lives his life. And the story is how he adjusts to that.

And then the operation wears off. They didn't know that that was going to happen, and he goes again back to a very retarded state. But I saw it, and what affected me most deeply about it was kind of the unconscious cruelty of... people in relating to other people. How we do so many things that are uncaring or unkind. And I felt that in myself. So when I went back to India, I spoke to Meningo about it. I told him that I wanted to do something to develop

Just more love, more compassion for other people. And so he suggested that I do the metta meditation. To do it intensively. There's a way of doing it as an intensive meditation practice where that's all you do. And I did matter for about two and a half months. In the same way that we're doing this, only just all day long, I would be doing the love and kindness meditation. And at first, it was real difficult.

For the first couple of weeks, it was very mechanical and dry, and I was just repeating these words and not feeling anything. But after about two or three weeks... It really began to settle in, and my mind was opening, my heart was opening to what the meaning of the words was. And it was very beautiful. There was one night, I remember...

I was sitting, wishing, loving thought. I got so in tune with that feeling of love. These feelings of happiness suffused my mind and body to an extent that I had never experienced before. It was just... a wonderful quality of the happiness and joy of love, loving kindness. And I thought, far out. This is how my life is going to be from now on. I'm going to just be filled with this love radiating out for all beings.

And I go running down to Meningrad to tell him of my big breakthrough in practice. And he was very happy, you know, that I was happy. But he said, don't get attached to it because it's not going to last. Needless to say, it didn't last. But it was real interesting to see the possibility of that state of mind, the potential in the mind for that kind of love.

The way you do metta in intensive practice, you start off doing it towards a person for whom you have a lot of love. Because it's easy to relate to the feeling for that person. After some time, you then do it... towards a person to whom you're indifferent to. So I went to Manindra and after some time he told me, well now do it to an indifferent person. And there was something in my mind I couldn't quite relate to that concept.

And so he said, well, why don't you just direct it towards this gardener who worked at the Vihara, this old Indian man. What I saw then, and it was so startling to my mind. was that in fact, here was a person who I had seen every single day and was in fact totally indifferent to him. He could have been a telephone pole. And to see how...

Many times in the course of a day, we're with people in some kind of relation, even if it's just proximity of space, and how that quality of indifference can be there. And it was very startling and opening. Just to see that, to see that in my mind. So I started directing all of this loving thought toward this gardener. It was wonderful. After some time, it's like every time I saw him, you know, he's the object of my love.

It's like I would light up. Of course, on a conscious level, he certainly didn't know what was happening. Although maybe on some other level, he was getting it. I had one other experience with the metta, which you might be able to relate to somewhat. I'd been doing it for some time, very into directing it to different people and then sending it out to...

all beings everywhere. Mata Vihar at that time, there was an old Nepali man who used to come and practice every year with Meningra. And he would bring a young boy as a kind of... servant to cook and clean and wash his clothes. Because the food was so bad at the Vihara, often I would have like a private stash. And I have these few oranges.

on the windowsill of my room outside, facing the corridor. I had these four oranges out there. I'm sitting doing, may all beings be happy, be peaceful. And I hear some rustling out there. And my mind starts going off. It's that Nepali kid. And he's stealing my oranges. May all beings be happy. May all be peaceful. I'm going to kill him. Be happy, be peaceful. And my mind was just doing this incredible skitty thing.

Of course, I went out and the oranges were there and it was a total fantasy and projection of my mind. You know, he wasn't even up there. And it was such a good lesson in just seeing that the mind... has everything in it, and not to be surprised by anything. It really has no pride, and it will put anything out. And to be prepared for that, and to have somewhat of a sense of humor about it.

Because that's all you can do. I had been with Munindra a few years when Goenka started teaching. That was actually quite traumatic because Munindra was all individual practice. There were no courses and no group sittings. In fact, Munindra never sat with us. I think in all the years I was with him, maybe he sat with us half a dozen times. It just wasn't his style to do that. GoAnchor was much more structured like this is, with group sittings and everybody in the hall.

And it was traumatic for me in my practice because he didn't allow chairs in the hall. So that's when I had to wean myself from my throne. And it took some time. That combined with the differences in style, Meningo was very simple and very ordinary in the sense that Jack was talking about last night. Golanco was much more dignified.

a different kind of presence. You really felt his power. But when I started studying with him, my mind started doing all these comparing trips. You know, Goenka would sit up a little higher, and Leninja would always sit just down on the floor. And actually, it turns out... It's just for visibility purposes. But my mind was very judgmental of, you know, why is he sitting higher? And at that time, the first year of practice with him, everybody would bow down when he came into the room.

And I spent a fair amount of time hassling in my mind with these judgments. You know, why does he do it like this? And Mimindra didn't do that. Until I realized what suffering was involved in that. And it was a good, again, a good lesson in practice. not to buy into that kind of judging or evaluating because it just creates suffering for oneself.

One experience I had in my years with Goenka, which I want to share with you, because it's such an important understanding in practice. It was the most painful lesson I learned. in all the years i was practicing when i first started with go anchor i had been sitting for a long time already so very quickly my meditation got very very deep and wonderful i would sit down

Goenka's technique is more awareness of the body. You scan the body and you feel the sensations. I got to the place of sitting down, and as soon as my attention would go into my body, it's like it would dissolve into... Just the energy of light. No solidity, no pain, no tension. And it was really blissful. I would just sit down and my body would become a body of light. It was wonderful.

There was no trouble sitting and it was rapturous and high. This went on for a long time. It went on for several months. After that, I came back to America and I got involved in... my family and doing some work. Then I went back to India, very anxious to get back and continue my practice and get back to my bliss. I went back to India and started to practice.

And for some reason, I don't know exactly what happened, but it's like my body had become from a body of light to a body of steel. I was just tight and locked and tense. And it was really difficult. There was a lot of pain and a lot of tension. Couldn't get any energy flowing in it. For two years, I practiced to get back to how it was. I kept on trying to force through it and break through it.

get past the blockages. It was so incredibly frustrating. And it was not good Dharma practice. That kind of wanting to get back to a past experience or wanting it to be a certain way. It took two years of struggling with that until I finally learned, it was a very slow process, that that's not what Dharma practice is about.

It's just to settle into exactly as it is without trying to make anything happen or get anything back to really be there in a full way for what's happening now. And when finally I caught on to that again. That's when things began to flow a little bit more easily because I wasn't struggling. I wasn't trying to break through or force anything. If you should find that happening.

You know, in your practice, trying to get something to happen, either to get back to or to get to some expectation, it doesn't have to take you two years to figure it out. Remember that always it's just to open up in the softest possible way to exactly what's going on in the moment. And it's not to make anything special, not to be practicing with a gaining idea. Because that kind of gaining or ambition in practice is tremendous suffering.

In those years of practice, I was back and forth about four or five times. And it was similar to what people here experience when they leave retreats. It was coming to retreat and then going out in the world. It was compounded. Not only was it going from intensive practice to a more worldly life, but it was going from India to America. So it's kind of a double, double shock.

The first few times were very difficult. I remember coming home. It was actually the first two, the first two times back. I was so depressed. All I wanted to do was sit. and smoke dope and listen to Bob Dylan and yearn to get back to India. And there was a real difficulty in adjusting, kind of integrating dharma practice in my life in a full way. I mean, sometimes people go into Barry after retreat and have trouble crossing the street. And Barry's not your bustling metropolis. It's hard.

Until you have practice in making that transition, it's not easy. It's like you're very slowed down now, much more than you're aware of. You know, you go out into the world, there's a lot of things coming at you, a lot of energy, it's very speedy. It's hard enough, as you've seen, to deal with your own mind. You go out there, you're going to have to deal with lots of people's minds. Be real soft. Be real easy with yourself.

be aware that there will be difficulties, and try to settle back. And just be open to that. This is a great learning. To close, I'd like to read one thing from Chuang Tzu. He said, great knowledge is all-encompassing, and small knowledge is limited. Great words are inspiring, and small words are chatter. When we are awake, our senses open.

We get involved with our activities and our minds are distracted. Sometimes we are hesitant, sometimes underhanded, sometimes secretive. Little fears cause anxiety. And big fears cause panic. Our words fly off like arrows as though we knew what was right and wrong. We cling to our own point of view as though everything depended on it. And yet our opinions have no permanence. Like autumn and winter, they gradually pass away. We are caught in the current and cannot return. We get tied up in knots.

like an old clogged drain. We are getting closer to death with no way to regain our youth. Joy and anger, sorrow and happiness, hope and fear. indecision and strength, humility and willfulness, enthusiasm and insolence. These states are all like music sounding from an empty reed. or like mushrooms rising from the warm, dark earth. They continually appear before us day and night. No one knows whence they come. Don't worry about it. Let them be. How can we understand it all in one day?

What was it that made you decide to come home, finally? feeling completed in that stage of my practice. Being a little sick, it's like by the time I left, India was close to winning. It was either leave or never leave. It's not the healthiest place for an extended period of time. I really felt like it was time to come back to the West. Does Manindra practice? Does he sit and meditate? He says he does. I've never really seen him in terms of formal sitting.

He's quite remarkable, though. There's an outside chance that he may be visiting sometime later in the three months. He's in California now, and it's not quite clear whether he's going to come or not. Just in watching him be in the world, you can see the fruit of all those years of intensive training that he did in Burma. He's very speedy. He's not slow at all. And that's why you don't want to confuse mindfulness with slow. The slowness is a training. When you really...

Trained in awareness, you can move at any speed, and meninja is the perfect example of how speedy you can get, and be very centered. Just in watching him move, there's a grace to his movement. He's never had the sense of toppling forward. It's always just settled back doing exactly what he's doing, being really present for it, but being able to juggle things in his life.

He described his practice in Burma. He's very soft and very gentle with a will like iron. It's like he has this core of strength inside. As an example of how he did his practice and perhaps as an inspiration to those of you who are staying, he said he would be sitting and he'd hear a sound. And he would notice the hearing. And he'd want to see what made the sound. He would notice the desire. He'd notice the intention to turn his head. The turning.

the seeing, the intention to turn back, the turning. If you practice like that, seven days. It's possible to do it. It's possible just to be settled back. There's no place to go. There's no hurry. To be so careful. So detailed in your experience. That's how he practiced. And it's clear. When you're with him, you see the fruit of that kind of training of awareness.

So there may be a point where you don't need to practice anymore. I think that's true in the sense that your life becomes your practice and the formal sitting... Although I'm sure he still does, but it's not as crucial as it is for most of us. There is a point where it's just totally integrated and everything you do becomes a sitting. because your attention is there.