These are likely the first AI assisted show notes done on this site for a podcast with Danish meditation teacher/coach, author, and translator Niels Lyngsø recorded Sept 25, 2024:
Topics Discussed:
- Who is Niels Lyngsø?: Niels introduces himself and his work as a meditation coach, sharing insights into his journey and how he approaches the concept of self.
- Understanding Self and Not-Self (Anatta): Niels and Josh dive deep into the Buddhist notion of anatta (not-self) and discuss how most people identify with their stories, bodies, and emotions. Niels explains how he teaches this complex concept in a relatable way, emphasizing that there is no core, stable self.
- Practical Meditation Insights: The conversation transitions into meditation practices, discussing how training attention and awareness can lead to emotional regulation and greater clarity. Niels explains how these practices work together to improve emotional insight and resilience.
- Meditation as a Path to Wisdom: Niels describes how meditation helps train attention and awareness, which ultimately leads to wisdom. He shares insights on how wisdom is not just intellectual but practical, contextual, and connected to actions in specific situations.
- Attention vs. Awareness: The distinction between attention (focused, narrow) and awareness (broad, holistic) is a key theme. Niels offers metaphors such as “spotlight vs. floodlight” to explain how cultivating both is essential for clarity of mind and emotional regulation.
- Daily Life Applications of Meditation: The episode concludes with a discussion on how meditation can be integrated into everyday life. Niels emphasizes that you don’t need to be a master to benefit from meditation—it’s about starting where you are and being consistent.
Key Takeaways:
- Self as a Construct: The idea of “self” is a fluid construct, often identified through stories, the body, or emotions, but in Buddhist practice, the goal is to recognize that there is no permanent, core self.
- Importance of Awareness: Meditation trains awareness, allowing practitioners to become more emotionally resilient by perceiving subtle emotional impulses before they develop into stronger emotions like anger or anxiety.
- Balance in Meditation: A balance between attention (focused) and awareness (panoramic) is crucial for clarity and insight, leading to better emotional regulation and practical wisdom.
Quotes:
- “Wisdom arises when you let go of the self and the ego, allowing clear awareness to guide actions.” — Niels Lyngsø
- “The self is closely connected to attention, while awareness is more selfless and holistic.” — Niels Lyngsø
Closing Thoughts:
Niels encourages listeners to take a pragmatic approach to meditation and Buddhist teachings. Whether it’s 10 minutes a day or deeper retreat work, the key is consistency and practical application in daily life.
Quotes from the google translated quotes I read from Niel’s article/essay The house is on fire. How do I find wisdom in the midst of a crisis of meaning?:
https://www.zetland.dk/historie/s8D3aQLg-a851J3YG-a7acc
John Vervaeke and other scholars investigating what wisdom is have not arrived at a single and exhaustive definition, but all agree that there are two dimensions to wisdom: a moral and a cognitive.
Morally speaking, wisdom is about the common good, the broader and more general and often also more long-term perspective.
Cognitively speaking, wisdom consists, among other things, in being able to see complexity and disregard self-interest; to be able to tolerate and deal with uncertainties; to be able to distinguish relevant from irrelevant, including distinguishing between the conditions that can be changed and the conditions that cannot be changed; to have an emotional elasticity, so that one is not controlled by strong emotions such as fear, anger or desire, but can listen patiently to what those emotions say and take them into account; and to have an intellectual elasticity so that one is not locked into one’s usual way of looking at problems.
The wise solution changes the premises of the problem, or rather: It changes what we foolishly assumed were the premises.
Although we call it ‘spiritual’ rather than cognitive, the development still concerns the same thing: a progressively richer and more nuanced perception of physical phenomena, causal relationships, time, space, movement, coherence, the relationship between self and world and so on. And at the same time an increasingly less self-centered and more nuanced understanding of human relationships and the related emotional and moral issues.
Niels’s essay mentions the classic burning house tale from the Lotus Sutra which reminds me of:
. . the Janasandha Jataka (Jataka 538), a tale from the Buddhist Jataka collection, which recounts past lives of the Buddha. The story involves a monk and the Buddha’s promise of heavenly nymphs as a reward for virtuous behavior, but the nymphs never come to pass in a straightforward way.
Here’s a summary:
The Janasandha Jataka
In a previous life, the Buddha was born as King Janasandha. A young monk approached the king, expressing frustration with his spiritual progress and seeking a tangible reward to motivate him in his practice. In order to encourage the monk, the Buddha (as King Janasandha) promised that if the monk were to continue practicing diligently, he would be reborn in a heavenly realm, surrounded by nymphs.
The monk, motivated by this promise, practiced earnestly, following the Buddha’s teachings. However, upon his death, the monk was reborn in a lesser realm, without any nymphs or immediate signs of the reward he expected. Disillusioned, the monk came to understand that the true reward was not the promise of sensual pleasures in heaven, but rather the deep insight and wisdom gained through dedicated practice and detachment from worldly desires.
Meaning and Significance:
The story illustrates an important lesson about spiritual practice. It highlights that while external rewards or promises may be used as initial motivation, the ultimate goal of Buddhist practice is liberation and insight, not sensual or material gain. It also demonstrates that attachment to expectations, even ones tied to spiritual practice, can hinder true progress.
In essence, the Buddha used the promise of nymphs as a skillful means (upaya) to encourage the monk to practice, but the true reward was the spiritual advancement that arose from dedicated effort, not the materialized form of heavenly pleasures.
Audio: Who Gets Wise With Practical Meditation? In Conversation With Niels Lyngsø
The raw unedited YouTube transcription of this podcast:
holess welcome this is Josh and today I have Neil
lunu with me today and Neils is Danish and I’m living here in Denmark so I’m
going to just jump into the the standard question but we have a I would say a
fairly deep uh practitioner here so this answer um I’m looking forward to this
answer who is Neils and what kind of work does he do oh okay um well first of all thank
you for inviting me uh I’m I’m happy to be here and uh so who am I well that is
that is a very basic question right and I can of course give you the conventional answer and say that I am a
56 year old man living in Denmark and I work as a meditation coach and also as a
an author and translator and then I can give you you know my life story in a few chapters uh
and that would be sort of the traditional way of saying who am I so I’ll give you a biography right but the
question is um are we our biographies is that is that who we are
and that’s actually a very a fundamental question to Buddhism as I’m sure we can
get into yeah this is well first off I’m sorry I didn’t even say hello we uh this
weird notion of talking before the show and then kind of forgetting my my entire
attention was uh pronouncing the name there at at the beginning so but this is a total fundamental question you know
who am I you know what is the self I think it’s something that we all take for granted you know and we just most
people dis gloss over it but in in Buddhist teachings and practice and and study too this notion of AATA of not
self you know it seems really maybe a little bit um I don’t know not
unapproachable but it’s it’s a very uh easy topic to really mess up and you
know there’s all kinds of theoretical ways but there’s more practical ways there’s so much to say and and so many
ways to to be confused on it uh but I think some of these um easier Notions of
yeah what are what are we identifying with and I would just say right off the bat most people identify with a story
right there’s a story of what they are who they are and um I think maybe in
meditation practice there’s a notion of actually D at least practicing towards a
direct experience of our reality instead of a story about reality because a lot
of people live in stories about reality instead of a direct experience and um so
but the easiest way for me to look at this is you know what am I identifying with and uh yeah how much am I taking
personally you know what am I taking personally so if we want to jump more into this notion of self and not self I
also think this notion of not self is like a strategy and this uh this this
self we have is like a construct that we create and sometimes it’s it can be really helpful and sometimes and
oftentimes it gets us in trouble and it leads to to problems and challenges that
don’t necessarily have to be there but yeah the the poly word for this is a Nat
Neils how do you how do you see this how do you uh tell people about this and teach people about this or when it’s
right to do so yeah you’re absolutely right it is a
very difficult um point to make because people get very confused if you say you
have no self uh of course I do or does it what does that even mean uh so yeah
it’s very confusing so uh I like a a slightly different wording of
anata so you could say that there is no core self that’s perhaps a bit easier to
understand uh so you could say that well that would imply that there is an
experience of self an everchanging experience of a self but there is no
sort of stable permanent core self so that makes it a
bit easier but but I I agree with you that the best way to approach it or to
sort of use a a Socratic method to to make people sort of go further into this
question is to ask who do you identify with so it could be the story so I could
I could have told you in in the introduction five or 10 different stories of who I am how I became who I
am today h and and so can everybody everybody can tell different stories of
their lives their autobiography up until this point and sort of believing that
that kind of defines who they are um another um thing people often
identify with is their body um so are you your
body um what if you do not have contact with your body are you then not
there um and then just to mention a third uh possibility which is perhaps more
relevant to meditation so people often identify with a point of
view so we we have this sort of intuitive sense
of myself being somewhere inside my head so and you can even hear that in
the way we speak so you can um for instance hear people say when they talk about meditation EXP experience oh there
was an itch up in my sculp or um I had pain down in my knees
so you’re saying up and down front and back so you’re having sort of a a you’re
defining a space from a point of view so there is this Center Point that is
supposed to be you but what’s interesting is that if you apply a certain technique in meditation sort of
a variant of the well-known body scan then you can actually try to find that point of view so if you if you if you
are pretty good at body scan then you can sort of try to scan inwards through
the head and find that point and uh spoiler alert you’re not going to find
it and it’s a very uh strange experience to to try to do that it is and I mean
kind of on a surface level it can seem like um for those of us like myself that
identify uh wrong and unhelpfully a lot of times with thinking and cognition it does seem to come somewhere from that
region but when you really try to nail it down right um and some people that
are visual they’ll the thoughts or the images seem to be kind of projected out in front or if auditory then we can
notice you know what voice the sounds are coming from if it’s our own voice like a teacher or a parent or it’s it’s
not really um noticeable so it depends I I think I think I’ve hear some teachers
say that most people primarily think in either you know um in words or sound uh
and then or or images and you know I think we all do both to a little degree
perhaps and um the I think the rare more rare one is is actually seeing words um
seeing the actual printed words but um yeah you know this is another thing
people identify with is emotions right that that’s who they are and really I
mean how attached are we to whatever we’re identifying with as a self I think is is an interesting thing and if we
really want to start investigating further too uh well perception I mean I don’t see as many people uh identifying
with perception um then there’s the the the cognition you know the valtion and then there’s Consciousness you get
really super ultra spiritual people sometimes and they think oh I’m Consciousness you know and this so these
can be broken down to am let’s just start with the body that’s the most recognizable one for most of us am I the
body you know is that who I am and you give a great example of well what happens when we don’t have contact with
our body then what right maybe in a dreamless sleep or in a coma something
or other circumstances you know then what um do I own the body you know I
don’t feel it’s um helpful for anyone else to own us even though we hear some people claiming that maybe corporations
might someday down the road through different Technologies put in her body through GMOs or inje whatever that they
might claim some kind of proprietary rights on the body I don’t not really talking about that but there’s a sense
that you know I own this nobody else owns this I own it but if that was the case you know I would be able to kind of
control it however I want I would say just like we have ownership over something else right we can have more
control you know change my heartbeat rate instantly you know I don’t want to
age all this stuff so that doesn’t seem very plausible and then am I in the body that seems to be kind of my um you know
prevailing sentiment when I investigate it but you know where is it like a little hermula in there somewhere is
there a little guy inside of there you know like where if I’m inside the body where where am I inside this body you
know some days I’m identifying more with where the pain is or the pleasure head or heart and then the other one that’s a
little bit more is um the body’s in me so I guess this would be more of a perception like I’m everything uh or I
mean the I’m I’m in the body or the body’s in me so um so that would mean
like I’m identifying with like the whole universe and then somehow I guess I’m yeah so and that doesn’t really cut it
either right so we can apply those four investigative modes to um to the body the feeling perception
thinking cognition valtion and then Consciousness and when we get people’s
answers to these things that investigate They Don’t Really there’s uh they they’re different so so this what does
this leave us with I mean I don’t know how how much we want to keep uh this topic but it is really
important so what I found more helpful is this and then that you said no self
so it I like this terminology of not self and I like this no uh core self
which is really relatable cuz some people say there’s no Essence right um that this core I think most people have
oh yeah there’s if you try to like um I think they say a banana tree you can cut
cut it apart but it’s hollow inside so if you if you really deconstruct it um
then there there’s really nothing to it but it’s it’s like a strategy this not self um one of the other I’ll just throw
in one more analogy that I found helpful that I heard from a teacher is the Big Dipper right there is no Big Dipper
there’s the Stars up there but this uh it’s a helpful construct for identifying
those types of stars but you know there’s not in and of itself a big dipper um so it it to me it’s like a
strategy and at the end of the day there’s um a shift I find that was helpful or is helpful when it’s made is
is viewing kind of more experience in terms of processes and things and parts
unfolding and processes happening happening that are conditional that
nothing really happens randomly or like um you know because I’m an agent making
it happen that everything is dependent on causes and conditions and we can affect seemingly affects are some
conditions but those conditions can’t be maintained in the long term and when we
think we can maintain conditions in the long term to the way we like you know and that’s how we’re going to be happy
well you know it’s it’s it’s inevitable that we won’t be able to control all the conditions um so yeah I think that I’ve
said enough about that for now yeah yeah it’s a huge topic and and it’s
difficult to to communicate because I think like with so many other things
um you actually need to experience this yourself before you really get it uh and
even me saying that experience it yourself that just shows us how the language
keeps messing things up for us so even if if some of the listeners might get
like an intellectual understanding of what you were just saying which is fine and that could
beginning then the real transformative power of this uh tradition and these
teachings only come when you actually experience this absolutely and this will
bring us to our next main point that we want to talk about today is what’s the whole point of meditation you know this
this notion yeah it is just words like these are words these are labels that we’re trying to point to the real
experience not the same thing as the experience and it it’s just without the
practice I’ll just say real quick all that stuff that I just said is can only be really touched at on a surface level
so to see and know this for ourselves so I’ll just throw this back to Neils um
what’s the point of meditation Wendy uh and I uh who a gal from Australia that’s
a meditation coach we do a Q&A roughly every month and we did the fundamental
question you know why meditate so I’ll just it’s a it’s a huge question but uh
Neil has written recently about this and I think he’s really he a really good
comprehensive understanding of this and a good way to explain it too yeah okay wow that’s that’s a huge
question so it might take me some minutes to to give a a proper answer but
yeah so basically you could say that there as I see it there is like um a
whole spectrum of reasons and you can sort of see it like there’s a low end of the pool and the deep end of the pool so
in the low end of the pool you meditate to calm your nervous system that’s you
spend 10 or 15 minutes a day focusing on your breath and it kind of calms your nerves and that’s nice it’s a good thing
so this sort of basic mindfulness that would be one reason uh so it’s it’s um
perhaps the best way to calm your nervous system certainly better than alcohol or any other kind of drug um so
that’s just a very basic reason it gives you calm peace but then if you sort of
continue into the deeper end of the pool which will also demand like perhaps a
little more than 10 or 15 minutes on the cushion every day uh and especially some Retreat time
I think I’m a very uh big fan of uh meditation Retreats I think a lot of the
good stuff only happens if you go on Retreat so if I should try to explain
what’s going on in the deep end it it might take like I said a couple of minutes because as I see it what we
train in meditation is basically um our Clarity so you could say we have
like these two forms of of clarity uh which could be called attention and
awareness so initially you are
mostly aware that you are training your attention because the the uh beginners
instructions are focus on your breath every time your attention wanders off you bring it back so you’re training
your attention you’re trying to stabilize your attention but the thing is that you’re
actually also at the same time training your awareness which is this kind of more
panoramic uh peripheral thing and you can make like an analogy with vision and
and it’s notable how we it’s almost impossible to talk about Consciousness
and related subjects without using visual metaphors so you could say attention is like the
spotlight and awareness is like the flood light so you have these two different kinds of light in your Clarity
or in your Consciousness or whatever so to make the analogy with with vision if
you if you’ve ever seen like a newborn baby who has not learned to focus so the eyes are just going around in the head
like this or if you m imagine yourself being super stressed out or perhaps very drunk and your eyes are just going
everywhere and so they what’s happening there is that you are focusing you’re
you’re putting your attention here then there then there your attention is moving or sort of sorry your eyes are
moving around very quickly which means that it’s actually difficult also to
orient yourself in the room so the the background will kind of be hazy when
when you’re attent when when your eyes are moving like that and I keep saying attention because that’s of course the
analogy so if you’re tension is very unstable moving quickly around from
Focus point to focus point then also your awareness will be hazy so when you
train your attention to stabilize your awareness will be more clear and this is where the good stuff
begins because when your awareness becomes more clear then you can begin
this other type of practice where you’re sort of not just stabilizing and calming
and relaxing but you’re actually investigating and furthermore even
deconstructing what you perceive and this training when when you actually
start working with your Clarity this is where you for instance you get much better emotional
regulation because you’re able to perceive tiny impulses of let’s say
irritation before they grow up and become anger or you are uh able to
perceive tiny impulses of uh
worry before it grows up and becomes anxiety so this is this is why you can
get a much better emotional regulation from training your awareness it you sort
of get to know your your feelings uh and your
emotions uh much better and by the way I I came to think of uh when you um talked
about what we identify with and a lot of people identify with their emotions I uh there was a few lines from
Leonard Cohen that popped into my mind Leonard Cohen who was as people probably
know also a s Buddhist and he he has these lines where he say I don’t trust
my inner feelings they come and go and um that’s something he knows
because he’s a Buddhist he has trained his mind yes and it speaks to impermanence too
you know that uh that why would we want to kind of latch on in grab something uh
and identify with it and kind of solidify it when it’s really kind of impossible to do that uh there was one
point that you mentioned that now I’m blanking on um I I love this metaphor
though of that oh that’s what it is the the subtlety and I think one of the reasons that this becomes more possible
meditation perhaps is it’s kind of like an artificial container right we’re
minimizing uh sense input and like you said the calming of in aam practice it
it just allows more uh stability and
um unified uh collectiveness and things settled down and so it seems like the
system is um more open and responsive or more capable even to seeing the
subtleties of reality right so um so the
the energetic system can become more notice a lot more subtleties and this is
where you know when it starts off it a lot of times especially meditation unless it’s
I guess coming up from a past memory or something that gets triggered and just floods out right away um that usually
they arise a little bit more subtly and then the awareness is already kind of more uh tension is more uh trained to to
to maybe see it and the the awareness expands and so there’s more radar space
I guess could be the way to put it and yeah so this way it’s it’s we’re not
taught in school really how to train awareness I mean train attention really even I think the military does some of
this right they attention or something like this but um it’s a type of
attention and awareness we’re just not really even taught that and um yeah yeah
I I once had the thought that if um if I should boil down meditation instructions
to one word it would have to be in French and I would
say that’s all that that’s the only instruction you need uh basically right
so yeah there’s a lot in in what you just said and I and I agree with um the
point about children in in school it’s so uh ironic that we always ask the
children to pay attention but we never teach them how uh which is uh so stupid
because it would be quite easy I think to just start every uh every day with five minutes uh
of just basic mindfulness and I I’m sure that would be a good investment for for
learning totally agree could really agree more I think some schools in the states are doing this now and some
schools that have the TM I think are doing this but it’s it’s really important in Practical and I think in
today’s society where you know um attention is is capitalized on you know
it’s a precious commodity people’s attention think the trillions that advertisers spend on it and a lot of
people are you know I mean even you get sucked into a rabbit hole on Instagram and scrolling and for get why I even
went on there to begin with and one thing after another and uh there’s there’s so much science involved and
getting people’s attention and getting them to come back tons and tons of money and effort spent on this and the I think
the I don’t know maybe this is too much of a generalization but the general psyche I think of um current day Society
is so fractured if we look at just media it’s just chop chop chop and look at
film in media from you know 20 30 years ago even and there was these long sequences
and people would uh could could pay just sit and see a long sequence but now it’s
every few seconds or multiple times a second it’s chopped up and either I
think it trains people’s attention uh to have less attention span and I’m wondering what it’s doing to to our
psyche too of not being able to have more wholeness and you
know um yeah interest in staying with one thing for a long time so this notion
of training the mind even just to to stay with something training the attention to stay with one thing um yeah
and and also at the same time training your awareness because I think it’s it’s
it’s nice to keep up this distinction because yes like you were just saying the attention can be captured very
easily and we can sort of fall into this kind of hyperfocus rabbit hole on the Internet
or whatever but but actually what we need to train is to
have a more um balance a better balance between awareness and attention and I
actually think that it was chadasa the the teacher Buddhist teacher who had he
had a very nice definition of mindfulness he said mindfulness is the optimal uh balance between attention and
awareness something like that and I really like that because this distinction is is not only a question of
Spotlight and floodlight or narrow and par par panoramic it’s also a question
of these two forms of clarity they they live in different hemisphere in in the
brain so one is a right brain and the other is the left brain so for instance the self that we talked a lot about the
self is very much connected to attention so you’re identifying with what you’re paying attention to the awareness is
much more selfless so that’s where you find anata that’s in that’s in the awareness and
the awareness is um also more holistic uh whereas the attention is
more on task and problem solving so there’s actually a lot of differences
between these two modes of being in your Consciousness and if like you say our
culture is training us to have this sort of Rapid Fire shifting
attention but but that really uh is bad for our
awareness and and so we are we are used to constantly moving our attention
around very rapidly and that means that this more holistic more panoramic more
uh selfless uh part of ourselves is sort of it’s
Vanishing it’s a really good point awareness is just endlessly fascinating
you know this this thing that can’t be kind of purified and it can’t be corrupted it just knows it just observes
it just notices uh using metaphors here the one I like to use a lot is the a movie
theater right where sometimes we’re so engrossed in the drama on the screen that we forget that it’s we’re actually
in a movie theater that we could stand up at any time turn around and look towards the projector and see the light
that’s actually coming um that that’s creating the whole thing doesn’t really have a
location you know and uh yeah it’s I’m always fascinated though but like what
blocks uh access to awareness you know what what hinders it you know there’s
the five um five standard hindrances in Buddhism and that comes into play here
but I I wonder if there’s any other and and speaking of uh Buddhist stuff here you know when I heard this this movement
of uh practical Buddhism to me it’s I had I had to chuckle a little bit because it it’s a little bit redundant
to me because you know the Buddhist said to he he knew all this stuff the teaching of the handful of leaves right
that he that his his knowledge and awareness and knowing was all the leaves
in the forest but he only taught one handful of believe suffering in the end of suffering and he wouldn’t he wouldn’t
even answer any of these metaphysical questions right and uh it would just suffering the end of suffering and so
it’s very practical or stress we could say stress you know that’s or or just
unsatisfactoriness so very practical thing that we’ve all met with and that’s all he that’s that was the core and what
he addressed and so to it has a lot of Buddhist stuff has gotten a lot uh I
would say quite a bit away sometimes from that Core teaching of suffering and
the end of suffering and I just had to had to point that out a little bit and and one last thing here start framing
this in and we’re talking about kind of cultivating and samata and bapas type
practices and mindfulness here and uh I guess where does this fit in to with
daily life because you know in kind of Buddhist teachings I said before the show it’s it’s often trained in are
framed in terms of Sam Sila samama PA are you know ethics uh
cultivation um you know meditative cultivations meditative practices and
then uh wisdom and right yeah I think that’s enough to throw in there that
that’s what’s called the three-fold training I think and it’s actually kind of a handy model of the noble Eightfold
Path right it’s sort of boiling down these eight points to only three to make it easier so yeah and I think it’s it’s
an excellent way to sort of sum up the the the Buddhist uh teachings so U I
think it was Lee brazington who had a nice way of reframing it he said it’s
U get your together concentrate your mind and use your concentrated mind
to investigate reality so that’s it that’s the three points yeah another excellent teacher
Lee rington um and I think that’s that’s basically it that’s what you need to do you need and maybe I would add
traditionally it has been seen like you start off with the Sheila you start off with with morality and then when you’re
sort of good enough with that then you can get your first meditation instructions and then when you have to
have your concentrated mind then you can get sort of the more Advanced Techniques more advanced practices and you know the
the young uh monk going to the sin uh
Monastery wanting to become a monk and and he’s just giving a a broom you know and you can just sweep the floor for
five years and then maybe we will teach you something so that’s the traditional way but I in my own uh guidance when I
guide people I try to sort of work on all all three levels at the same time I
don’t think you have to start with like five years of morality training before you can start focusing on your breath
because the thing is that these three different uh um categories of practice
they enhance each other so when you when you get a more concentrated mind it’s
actually easier to get wisdom and when you have more wisdom it’s easier to
behave morally and when you behave morally it’s easier to concentrate
because you you don’t have all these thoughts about all the terrible stuff you did and so on so they’re kind of
feeding on each other yeah it’s it’s a really great point and I would just uh
kind of addad in a way to to to mention this but it took meditation to see how
kind of um off my ethics were you know and to really recognize that yeah you
know it’s so it’s so wild and I think as Zan cha give westers this candy of meditation to because I guess maybe it’s
more structured for an Eastern world but yeah they do are all relevant and yeah
wow it was that an eye opener to see how directly related behavior and conduct is
to to to well-being you know it’s it’s so obvious for so PE so many people and
so obvious to me now but it’s just like it was blind to it for a while and uh
pretty pretty wild and yeah yeah but but the thing is we we I think we all have
like a moral compass maybe with the exception of a few Psychopaths but but
basically most people have they we do know what is right and wrong we do know
but then most of us are also able to sort of hide that from ourselves sort of
convince ourselves that I can do this even though I know perhaps I shouldn’t
and when you get more of this Clarity that we talked about just before when you train your mind to have your
attention stable your awareness more clear then it becomes increasingly
impossible to sort of run around corners with yourself and try to tell yourself
stories that it’s okay to steal or it’s okay to whatever immoral uh thing that
you’re going to do so so yeah so these things they go together I think oh absolutely and it it turns to the point
it’s like it’s pointless and yeah I know ex back when I was doing things that
weren’t helpful to me or anyone else right it’s it’s wild how the mind can
rationalize so many things and and tell these stories and then be in denial
about uh what’s actually going on even and kind of dilute ourselves and lie to
ourselves I mean the the mind is a it’s a CL classic trickster and it doesn’t have any shame really either a lot of
times but I also agree with this moral compass it’s just this these things that cloud it and get in the way you know
when these things are removed yeah most people have this this this natural place
in the heart where this shines from and it it really boils down to as simple as nonh Harmony you know this notion of non
harm and it’s on so many different degrees and levels but how many things
are there to justify harming you know that just lots and lots of ways to justify harming uh are seemingly
Justified but at the end of the day you know nobody wants to be harmed uh and
that I know of and so we’re all in that same boat so it it makes a lot of
logical sense too and I think we ought to transition to wisdom now as well um
and uh unless you have a few anything to add on there no let’s just transition
that’s okay I wise I was going to read just a couple selections from um from Neil’s
uh piece you essay you wrote for is it zetland is that how you say it it’s a
Danish online magazine yeah and this is from Google translate but I thought it was good U good enough and how do you
say John uh V okay so John V and other Scholars
investigating what wisdom is have not arrived at a single and exhaustive definition but all agree that there are
two Dimensions to wisdom a moral a moral and a cognitive morally speaking wisdom
is about the common good and the broader and more General and often also more long-term perspective um now I’m just
drawing a couple selections here this isn’t necessarily how it goes and we uh he built the article around um this
Burning house metaphor that’s is it in the Lotus Sutra or or the damond Su okay
and uh So cognitively speaking wisdom
consists among other things in being able to see complexity and disregard
self-interest to be able to tolerate and deal with uncertainties to be able to distinguish
relevant from irrelevant including distinguishing between the conditions that can be changed and the
conditions that cannot be changed to having emotional elasticity so that one
is not controlled by strong emotions such as fear anger or desire but can listen patiently to what these emotions
say and take them into account and to have an intellectual elasticity so that
one is not locked in locked into one’s usual way of looking at
problems and then two more short paragraphs the wise solution changes the
premise of the problem or rather it changes what we foolishly assumed were
the premises were the premise premises yes although we call it spiritual rather
than cognitive the development still concerns the same thing a progressively
richer and more nuanced perception of physical phenomena causal relationship
ships time space movement coherence the relationship between self and world and
so on and it and at the same time an increasingly less self-centered and more
nuanced understanding of Human Relationships and the related emotional
and moral issues yeah Bravo there and Bravo to to Google Translate it’s just pretty pretty
um I think just just these quite a good distillation of if we start you know
looking into what is wisdom what do you mean by that you know um
so and I I think that um it’s it’s probably easy to to start off by saying
what wisdom is not so it’s h and I I developed this in this in this essay but
just to say it very briefly so it’s it’s not the as int uh and it’s not the same as
intuition you cut out there on the first part I’m sorry oh sorry yeah so I’m just trying to to sort of Define what wisdom
is not yes so so wisdom is not the same as intelligence it’s not even correlated
with intelligence you can be wise and not intelligent or vice versa and it’s
not the same as intuition because it takes more
deliberation uh to be wise than to be intuitive and and then also uh to me as
a central point is that wisdom is first and foremost a practical thing it’s
something that is working in a and it’s um sort of
contextual it’s situational it’s a solution to a
specific situation so you cannot boil it down to words of wisdom that you find
you know in the Bible or or or in Buddhist uh scriptures uh words can
never be wisdom in themselves wisdom is doing the right thing in a
complex situation would be a short definition and and just one last thing this John V
this uh Canadian philosopher and and cognitive scientist a very interesting
man he’s also quite Advanced doist practitioner taiichi practitioner and
and meditator he has a very lovely take on the old Socratic motto know th self
and this also relates back to what we spoke about in in the intro so know
thyself doesn’t mean that you have to know your autobiography you have to know your story it means you have to know
your own users manual so how do you actually work what stops you what makes
you go what can you do what can you not do these are these are such great
important points I want to get your take on like nosis though when it comes to
wisdom I mean this is from direct knowing uh and then you know how do we
uh I guess cultivate wisdom the other thing that I was just wondering about too is the the the morality link here or
the the ethics link were I I guess it’s probably tongue and Chek that some gangsters are considered Wise Guys right
I don’t know if it’s just that’s kind of supposed to be humorous or whatever but there’s also this notion of wisdom of uh
knowing kind of when to be quiet and not say anything you know or um you know
yeah exactly how do wa this the situational thing and um yeah it’s it’s
it’s interesting to see different degrees of skillful action in the world and how that comes about you know um so
any any thoughts on all this yeah yeah it it just strikes me now that wisdom is
actually closely connected to the idea of no self for because it kind of uh arises situation
where there is no self so if you can sort of uh hold your own self back hold
your ego back and not wanting to control the situation to your own advantage or
to some um fixed idea about about how
this should be or how this should go then wisdom can arise but it’s actually not your wisdom it it so there I think
some some wise men said that there is actually no wise men or women uh there
are only wise actions so uh wisdom can arise in a specific situation if the uh
people involved in the situation can let go of their selves and their egos then
the wisdom will arise it’s already there as potential uh and but usually it gets
sort of uh hindered by our egos our way our ways
of trying to take control but it’s actually there in the clarity or in the awareness you could say when if you can
just relax relax then the wisdom will arise well that’s I think this is um a
beautiful place to start U wrapping up Neils i u so appreciate you coming on
today and uh and going over the topic we did and I I find they’re of utmost
importance to meditators and it’s good getting your U perspective insights
wisdom and um how you operate too uh around all these um so why don’t why
don’t you leave folks with how they can get in touch with you um kind of the
events I know you’ve already uh got one uh like a one Retreat coming up right
that’s that’s it’s completely booked right and you you might have added another I don’t know and some things in
the work what you want to talk about how people can get on your newsletter all all this stuff anything else you have
that you want to announce and then uh what what what would you like to leave uh um any kind of message maybe to to
wrap up or or leave uh the listeners with okay thank you uh well first of all
if people want to get in touch or to see what I’m up to then it’s it’s quite easy
because they can go to my web page and so I have a um an English version which
is pragmatic buddhism. comom and uh there’s not much info on that because I
mainly operate in Danish so if you are familiar with the beautiful Danish
language then you could go to buddhis that’s the Danish version and uh
both of these sites you can find my email and and contact me me and and I I guide people in meditation uh both in
English and and danish uh and then I have these uh events like you mentioned
like Retreats and online events and so on and and um I think if I would have a
a little message to leave people with it would be that I like this pragmatic approach that’s why I call what I do
pragmatic Buddhism and it might be like you said it’s actually a bit of um
use that adjective because Buddhism is pragmatic or was at least in the beginning but what I mean by that is
that you don’t you don’t have to be like an Olympian champion in meditation you
can you can start wherever you are and if you if what you can do is meditate 10 minutes a day that’s fine if you can
meditate in in the bus or on the bicycle that’s fine I think it’s just uh and you
can start anywhere with one of the three trainings the the morality the concentration of the wisdom it it’s just
keep it keep it simple keep it pragmatic don’t don’t aim too high very cool so may all beings
everywhere come to know the most optimal and ideal um straight forward uh
practical pragmatic approach that will be of benefit for themselves and for
others and for all beings everywhere and may all beings everywhere realize Awakening and be free
Integrating Presence 