Rev Left Radio - Buddhist Philosophy: The Four Noble Truths and The Eightfold Path

Episode Date: November 13, 2020

Breht introduces and explicates the core teachings of the Buddha, and then (after the outro music) walks the listener through a guided meditation centered on the conscious cultivation of loving kindness and compassion.  Outro Music: 'I Love (It) So Much' by Mount Eerie ----- Please Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's episode, I'm going to do something a little different. I know you've probably heard that before, but this is outside of the realm of what we usually do. It's another monologue-style episode where I basically present an introduction to the core Buddhist teachings of the four noble truths and the eight-fold path. it's something I'm trying out I've gotten a lot of interest specifically on Patreon whenever I talk about this stuff

the feedback is overwhelmingly positive and so I figure I'll continue down this path I have a good friend and co-host on guerrilla history who is into Sufism scholar and a practitioner of that mystical tradition within Islam where I'm going to have on a very soon probably by the end of this year

to continue to explore these elements that don't necessarily fall directly into politics, but address other aspects of our lives as human beings in the cosmos. And so because there's such good feedback, because people seem genuinely interested, I'm going to continue to do this until people tell me, okay, enough. A couple of things before we get into this, at the very end, if you listen beyond the outro music, there will be a guided meditation, which I mentioned in the show itself, that I conducted for Patreon and then I made it public.

The feedback has been absolutely wonderful on that front, so I figured out at it here. So if you stick around past the outro music, you can engage in that little 10-minute guided meditation. And then the second thing that I didn't mention in the show itself, but I want to point out up front, is meditation itself is like any other thing. It's not going to immediately result in amazing things. You're not going to sit down for 10 minutes, meditate, and have some blissful, amazing experience. If you want to build muscle, you go to the gym every day and you put in the work. If you want to get healthy, you start putting in the work of eating healthy every single day.

And over time, the progress is made. But you don't go to the gym, lift a few barbells, and say, why am I not ripped? You know, you don't eat a kale salad and say, why am I not completely healthy and I still have all this weight? It's a practice that you cultivate over time. And so I want you to think that as well. When you sit down, you meditate, you're not going to have some. some mind-blowing experience. This thing is a subtle, protracted process. And so allow for that and hold these things lightly without dogma and without an overconfidence in your own ability

to control and will things to happen. All right. Without further ado, let's go ahead and get into it. This is my little monologue style episode on the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. Enjoy. Okay, so for today's Okay, so for today's episode, I'm going to do something different. which is an introduction to basically the core teachings of Buddhism. And those are summed up incredibly nicely and simply in the four noble truths and then the eightfold path. So first and foremost, the four noble truth. This is the teaching of the Buddha.

This is the grounding and the basic foundation of Buddhist philosophy and practice. And what are the four noble truths? well the first of the noble truths is that to live is to suffer the poly word duca which is often translated as suffering or pain is an innate characteristic of existence right it is a it is inherent in in life that we suffer and suffering here can mean more than just the immediate obvious and explicit experience of pain or acute suffering duca can be translated more subtly into unsatisfactoriness right this this constant sense that we have whether we're aware of it or not that things just aren't quite right right we're always looking

to the future to be happy we're always looking over the shoulder of the present moment thinking that somewhere down the line will get what we want and that will eventually make us happy some people even push that off beyond death into the realm of heaven. But what that points to is that there's something about here and now. There's something about the human mind that creates this constant nagging, underlying sense of never quite being fully content. The second of the noble truths is the cause of suffering. So if life always involves suffering in obvious and more subtle ways. What is the cause of suffering? Well, the cause of suffering is craving, is attachment, is, it's often put as desire, right? All these three words are different ways of saying the same

thing. Given that everything in life, from the dialectical Buddhist perspective on life, is a constant process of change. Everything is inherently impermanent. And we suffer because we cling to, we become attached to the impermanent nature of things as if we can as if we can make it permanent right um this can be in the form of desiring something you don't have craving something you want or attaching to something emotionally mentally that just by its very nature will fall away and thus cause suffering so we have the first noble truth which is life is suffering the second noble truth, which diagnoses the cause of suffering. You know, we suffer because we have this mistaken belief that we're a separate, individual,

solitary little eye behind the eyes and between the ears, cut off from the world by our skin, right? That's the outside world, and I am in here. We suffer because of the inclination of the mind to cling to the impermanent nature of things and to see ourselves as fundamentally separate from the flow. of life. And before we move on here, maybe an example or a couple examples will help flesh this second noble truth out. So let's say that you are a young, beautiful person. You become attached to your beauty. Your beauty is your foremost character trait that you put forward in the

world. As the aging process continues, as impermanence asserts itself, the reality of impermanence asserts itself on your body. You begin to age, get wrinkles, and your beauty, the thing that you are attached to, begins to fade away. Now, if you were clinging to yourself, your view of yourself as inherently involving beauty, well, the decay of that beauty over time, at least in the conventional sense, conventional beauty, will cause you to suffer. another example let's say that your sense of self is tied up in your status you have a high paying job that comes with a lot of social respect and you view yourself as that thing as as a successful you know person with status and society and then a recession or a depression comes along you

lose your job you lose all your wealth you lose all your status because your mind was clinging to the idea of your sense of self being tied up with your status, the loss of that status creates suffering. And we can even get more subtle. And I think we see this a lot with celebrity culture, where people become attached to the idea that fame and wealth leads to happiness, right? We all have some version of this where I don't have this thing now, but if I could only get this thing, I would be happy, whether that is a romantic partner, whether that is a romantic partner,

whether that is a certain job or whether that's what our society tells us is important like fame and wealth and so often what do we see with celebrities we see them obtain fame and wealth and then immediately sort of find out that the thing that they thought would fill the hole inside of them

the thing that they thought would make them happy once they get it once they obtain that thing they find that their mind is still unsatisfied the illusion breaks down often in very concrete, explicit, and sudden ways in that scenario, and we see a lot of people, especially kids who are pushed into that context, really struggle with that. And sometimes that can lead to

addiction, that can lead to depression, that could lead to a radically deteriorated sense of self where you achieve the thing that you thought would make you happy and you find out once you have it, you're still not happy. And that leads to a whole bunch of different types of disillusionment. So however obvious or subtle we want to make this, the fact is the mind, the machinations of the mind, how the mind works is the cause of our suffering. The third noble truth is that there's an end to suffering, right? The good news is that these things can be, this clinging of the mind, this illusion of being a separate small little self inside a bag of skin, these are illusions and they can be seen through. and that this is a process of cessation or letting go of the the mind's gravitational pull towards craving desire and attachment and then the fourth noble truth is the eightfold path right is basically how do you do that if there if life is suffering if we understand the cause of suffering and we say that there is a possibility of the end of suffering the fourth noble truth is the path out and that fourth noble truth is the eightfold path okay so what is the eightfold path well first and

foremost we have to understand that the eightfold path basically breaks down into three you could call them subcategories and those are moral conduct right ethics the second one is mental discipline and the third one is wisdom so let's go through these eightfold this eightfold path but let's remember and this is important going forward that these things are taken up together and they're not done in any sequential order right you don't start with one and then work through the others but rather they all come together and they all reinforce one another so you could you could extract some of these right like right speech right action and just have an ethical framework for living life but if that is separated from the wisdom components and the mental discipline components of mindfulness and

concentration and effort, then that's all it can be. Is this another prescription for ethics, which is good in and of itself, but doesn't get you toward enlightenment, right? It doesn't get you toward seeing through the fundamental illusions of the mind that can bring liberation from so much of our suffering. So to understand the eightfold path is to understand it as eight spokes of a central wheel. You can't break the spokes off the wheel and still reach enlightenment. It's all part of one wheel.

And if you want the wheel to work properly, all of these things must happen together. And the eightfold path, as Buddha said, in very clear-cut terms, is the path to enlightenment. So if you take these eight things and you really, truly dedicate your life to practicing them, that is how you move in the direction of enlightenment. You lop off any of these, then you lop off the very ability for the wheel to turn. So let's go ahead and go through these one. by one. And before we get into the details, I also wanted to mention that there are two sides to development that the Buddha stresses. And these two sides are compassion and wisdom. You need to

cultivate both sides of this to be a productive or, you know, you might put it as the perfect sort of development, is having these two things in balance. And by compassion, we just mean love, charity, kindness, tolerance, generosity, you know, being emotionally open, having an open heart for other people, helping other people. And what we mean by wisdom is the intellectual side, you know, developing the qualities of the mind, you know, doing the right sort of study and understanding things for how they actually are. And if you develop these things unequally, there are problems, right? If you only develop the emotional side, you can become what is known as like a good-hearted fool, right? You have an open heart, but your understanding, your wisdom is completely lacking. On the flip side,

to develop only the intellectual side and neglect that emotional side, you become sort of hard-hearted. You become intellectual without feeling, the compassionate side, the connection to other human beings can get lost, and it can become too abstract, too over-intellectualized, too disconnected from the people and the sentient beings that are around you. So to be perfect in this way, you really have to develop both equally, and that's the sort of the aim of the Buddhist way of life. You have to develop wisdom and compassion together because they are inseparably linked and they inform each other. And so that's something to keep in mind as we go through the eightfold path is that these two sides need to be developed, and that it again reiterates

that point that these are all spokes of a singular wheel. And it's this dialectical totality, you know, to not get too one-sided. You know, Buddhism is often called the middle path between asceticism and hedonism, right? You don't need to go sit in a cave to become enlightened, right? But you also, if you live a life of pure hedonism and let your desire take you from one moment to the next, you'll never get anywhere either. And so, you know, understanding these things as equanimity, as balance, as harmony, as moderation, is a really helpful way to approach, not only the eightfold path, but so much of life itself.

So let's get into the first part, and this is the ethical conduct sort of subcategory of the eightfold path. And the first one is right speech. So right speech basically means you don't tell lies. You don't gossip. When you open your mouth to talk, you're not doing it in a way to abuse others, to down. you don't get caught up also in like idle meaningless babble and and small talk right you don't talk just to hear your own voice right speech is really being mindful of the ways you talk the effects that you're talking has on other people you know and and the downstream effects of what you're

putting out there and so that is trying to to not tell lies to anybody trying not to slander talk shit, create chaos and disunity and harmful effects through your words. Don't abuse people. Don't put people down. Be polite to people. Speak nicely to people. Have that compassion come out in the way your voice comes out in the way that you treat other human beings.

The second is right action. And right action is ethical conduct, really holding yourself to high ethical standards in your daily life, particularly when nobody is. looking and you're not going to get praise from anybody. Right action is really holding yourself accountable. And here I think it dovetails well with a theory of morality in the subfield of philosophy known as ethics, which I personally subscribe to, which is virtue ethics, right? And by virtue ethics, the idea is that you don't get morality, you don't become a moral person by having some shorthand rule for how to make a moral decision, whether that's the Kantian,

categorical imperative or some utilitarian calculus, but rather to be a moral person means to actively cultivate character traits within yourself that are moral. And that can only be done through actually doing moral things in the moment. And over time, you cultivate an ethical character that no matter what you face, no matter what ethical dilemma you face, you're going to already have that character as the bedrock from which to make meaningful, enlightened, moral, and ethical decisions and actions. And, you know, this also means that you don't go out and kill shit, right? If you see a bug, it's not bothering you.

There's no need to smash it, right? You don't steal from people. You don't hurt people. You definitely don't engage in any form of sexual misconduct whatsoever. And that is stated very clearly in these sorts of discourses, you know. Sexual abuse of any sort obviously is radically unethical, behavior. And by doing these things, not only are you causing harm in the world, but you're ensuring that you do not make progress on this path. Because to strip out right action is to

strip out the ethical component of this entire thing and to kill it in the process. The next one is right livelihood. And this is, you know, it goes towards our professions, toward what we do for a living, towards how we make money, how we get by in the world. Right. livelihood means that you make you make your living you get by in the world without causing harm to others right you can't be a Buddhist and then go clock in at Raytheon to to man a drone you know you can't you can't go out and be a Republican politician lying about the pandemic causing millions of people to die just so you can get more money or profit or or political power and then come home and meditate and think that you're you're some

sort of you know enlightened being on the path of awakening you know you don't make your livelihood by hurting other people and that can be in a myriad of different ways but it should be pretty obvious that this is an outgrowth of right action you know go out in the world make your living absolutely you know provide for your family but doing in a way that does not cause harm to others and that's incredibly important so those three things taken together right speech right action and right livelihood they constitute the ethical conduct subcategory of the eightfold path. And now we can move on to the second subcategory, which is mental discipline.

And the first one here is right effort. So right effort is the will to prevent evil and unwholesome states of mind from arising, to get rid of evil and unwholesome states that have already risen within you, and to produce or to cultivate good, wholesome states of mind that have not yet arisen. And if you're a Patreon or you even go on our Patreon, because it's a public episode now, but we did a compassion, loving kindness, guided meditation, right, where we purposefully concentrate the mind to cultivate the wholesome state of loving kindness, first directed outwardly towards others,

and then in the instance that I put forward on the Patreon, to then turn around and apply that compassion to yourself. But even if you don't apply it to yourself, however you want to do that loving kindness meditation, it is the right effort of cultivating wholesome states of mind and on the other side of that is you you decultivate you disincentivize you don't cultivate negative states of mind you don't let desire run rampant in your mind you don't let things like revenge and hatred and anger be a motivating force in your life those things will arise right and that's where mindfulness and

concentration can come in to allow those energies of anger and hate and and the need for revenge to arise in the in the in the mind but to let them go right and if you don't get attached to them if you don't fuel them with your own thoughts and reinforce them with justifications for why it's okay for you to feel this way you'll actually and you actually just feel these these emotional states as energy in the body you'll you will quickly find out that these things wear themselves out very quickly so while you may get angry and have a couple seconds of an emotional outburst through these practices, you can become to shorten and shorten that emotional expulsion. So while you may have that moment of rage, you don't need to feel

bad about that or guilty about that, you can watch it dispassionately, let it surge through the body and fall away. And that is a way of doing right effort. If you've ever almost been in a car crash, and this is something you might play with, those moments where, like, you know, you're going through a red light, and somebody just slams on the break or swerves around you. We've all been there if we've been driving for any significant period of time. You ever notice that hot feeling that goes through your body that like, ugh, that tingly hot sensation that surges through your body? That's energy in the body, right?

And it's your adrenaline kicking in. It's fear pulsing through your body. Next time you do feel that, try to just notice it as bodily phenomena. Try to notice it just how does it actually feel when that when that heat surges through your body? your body and your fingers get little tingly, you know, don't fuel it with thoughts. Like, oh my God, I was so close. Fuck, I could have died. That person should have been watching. Why wasn't that person watching? That was clearly my turn. They should have yielded to me. Don't do any of that, but feel the energy going through your body. And that's a way to sort of begin to understand how

emotions arise as energy in the body. And you can start to see the next time you get angry or jealous or anxious how you can sort of drop away from fueling those states of being with thoughts and justifying them fall away from that step back feel them just as energy in the body and watch them come and go right in permanence everything that arises falls away and that is that is pushing in the direction of right effort the second one on this subcategory is right mindfulness and this is meditation this is the practice when you sit down and you become mindful of your breath when you become mindful of sounds when you become mindful of sensations in the body when you become mindful of thoughts arising and falling away when you are meditating this is right mindfulness

and this practice is in a lot of ways central to everything else because while you can tell yourself that you want to be ethical while you can tell yourself i want to put in the effort to be a better person meditation allows for the awareness to be cultivated within yourself meditation is not you going and sitting down and trying to make something happen it's not you going and trying to get into some state of mind meditation is simply becoming aware of the thoughts the feelings the sensations the sounds as they come and they go So instead of thinking in your head all day where you're compulsively talking to yourself in your head often about utter nonsense and you're unaware that you're doing it, meditation allows you to cultivate a certain ability to step back and watch those processes play out without getting swept up in them. So right mindfulness is central.

It is the meditation component of all of this. and you cannot have these other things in any real authentic, lasting, permanent way without the awareness and the drenching your mind in the awareness of its machinations over time. That is what allows for these things, these good things to take root and grow and these bad things to sort of arise and fall away more quickly and more quickly as you get better and better at mindfulness, at meditation. the third one is right concentration and this is a form of mental discipline the subcategory of mental discipline where you train your mind to be able to stay concentrated on something and if you've ever tried to follow your breath right follow your breath for 10 breaths without having a thought try try not to think a thought for 60 seconds you'll quickly find that your mind can't stay concentrated, and particularly in our modern day social media, two second

goldfish attention span type of mentality that we're all indoctrinated with, the ability for the mind to concentrate becomes even harder, right? After you spend three hours on Facebook, try to sit down and read a book. Your mind is all over the place. So the meditation and the concentration are two things that really reinforce one another and when we do simple exercises like focusing on the breath particularly when you're just getting into meditation to put your attention on the breath is not so much meditating as it is creating the foundations that will allow you to meditate creating the conditions that will allow you to sustain awareness by making the mind more able to concentrate.

And we use the breath because the breath comes and goes. The breath arises and falls. No matter where you are, no matter what you're doing, the breath is right here and right now. And so it becomes a particularly useful object of concentration, particularly when you're starting out. Over time, you can leave the breath behind. You can fall back into what is known as more open states of awareness where you include sounds, breath, sensations, thoughts, emotions, and you watch things as they come and fall in their

totality. But starting out, it's very helpful to begin by concentrating the mind, by sharpening the mind on the wet stone of the breath, you know, using that as the ability to concentrate your mind, which will allow you to become more efficient at meditating, right? Become able to sustain awareness longer. And this is important because meditation is not just, a breath exercise. It's not just a stress relief exercise. It is a process by which you sharpen the mind's awareness of itself to the point where it can do the sort of explorations that are necessary. It can look deeply into the nature of thoughts. It can look deeply into the nature of the illusion of the self. And that looking deeply requires sustained awareness and concentration

is how you build up that capacity. So these things are deeply connected. And then there's two more factors in the eightfold path, and these are under the subcategory of wisdom. And that is right thought and right understanding. So right understanding is this idea that you study these things, right? You understand the four noble truths. You understand that change is the only constant.

You understand how your mind clings. and desires and gets attached to things so you can intellectually understand those things so you can understand why the rest of the eightfold path needs to be carried out. This is the study aspect of things. This is the, you know, like in Marxism, we talk about theory and practice, and we understand that to make our practice better, we have to cultivate understanding through the study of political theory. So we humbly submit ourselves to studying political theory so that we can cultivate the right

understanding to make effective action in the world. And you can make that parallel in the Buddhist tradition right here. We read books on Buddhism. We listen to stuff like this, right? We seek out Dharma talks. We go to, you know, we find teachers and we learn under them and we cultivate right understanding because to try to do this practice without understanding why we're doing it, what it means to do it, what the goal of doing it is, you can very quickly become. incredibly lost and flounder. And then the last one is right thought. And right thought denotes the thoughts of selfless renunciation or detachment, thoughts of love and thoughts of nonviolence, which are extended to human beings to all sentient beings. It's very interesting and important

to note here that thoughts of selfless detachment of love, of nonviolence, of loving kindness, of compassion, they're grouped on the site of wisdom. And this clearly shows that true wisdom is endowed with these noble qualities again going back to this idea that you can't separate compassion from wisdom right thought is the cultivation of the helpful beneficial loving kind things that pop up in our mind and the not turning away not trying to escape not rejecting the negative things but through awareness through concentration through the understanding of how the mind works, those things have less and less of a grip on us. And so you really do have this ability over time to say, you know, this feeling and this thought

that's making tears run down my eyes because I so desperately want to prevent the suffering of this other sentient being, that is a thought in a wholly different category than this other thought of petty jealousy when my partner, you know, has some flirtatious encounter with somebody else and I'm now encompassed in this jealous rage which is always undergirded by insecurity right so this is not a helpful way of being this these are not helpful feelings and thoughts to cultivate whereas love for my fellow for my fellow human beings you know selfless compassion for others these are things that when they arise they should be cultivated they should be they should be held gently and nourished and that is right thought so altogether you get a

a path that you can really follow. You can take this eightfold path. You can put it up on your mirror at home. You can put it on your dashboard in your car. You can really try to cultivate all of these different things and to walk this path, to do all of these things sincerely, not because you want to get something out of it, not because you want to be a better,

more effective person in the world or to say, yeah, you know, not only am I good at all this stuff, but I'm also spiritual, you know, not to do any of that, but rather to humbly, oftentimes out of the view of others, not seeking praise, not trying to get somewhere, not, not reentrenching this desire model where it's like, okay, well, then if I only do the eightfold path, and I really get really good at it, then I'll be happy. Then down the road sometime, I'll get to the point where I'm happy by, you know, all of that misses the point. You humbly quietly cultivate the eightfold path and you let the process of awakening take you where it will because and this is important to meditate to engage in these practices is not to

take control and make something happen it's not to to turn yourself into a new and better person it's to see through the illusion that there's a you to control this shit at all that is fundamentally important and if you can disabuse yourself in the early days of starting off on this path, that you're one trying to get anywhere, that you're two, trying to become a better, more full, rounded person,

or three, that you're the one doing it, it'll help a lot. It'll help you to hold this practice less intensely. It'll help you to strive less. Again, moderation. So you don't want to be so far on the path where, like,

I'm going to will myself to enlightenment. I'm going to sit down and through iron discipline, in force myself to meditate three hours every day and I will get enlightened you know by doing that you're reasserting the very self that is illusory and you will prevent yourself from making progress because you're still locked up in this idea that there's a separate you from the flow of life that can grab on and control the flow on the other end of that error is the you know well it's going to take care of itself if I don't have any control and there's no me to grab this thing by the horns, then I'm just going to go crack a beer and watch sports and hopefully through grace I'll

become enlightened at some point. Well, that's too far on the other side. You're not putting in the right effort. You're not sitting down and meditating. You're not cultivating these states of mind. You're just letting, leaving it up to some mysterious force of nature to do it for you. Both sides of this path are errors. And again, we go to moderation. We go to the middle path. Put in the effort. to the cushion, do your meditation practices, but don't think that you are in control, don't seek some state of mind that exists in the future, and don't try to will it to happen. This can sound paradoxical, and I don't blame you if you're confused about, okay, then what the fuck do I do on that?

Because if I can't do on one side, I can't do the other, then what do I do? Moderation, the middle path, put in the effort, but hold it lightly. and understand that the thing that you're ultimately going to see through is the illusion of a self that has control at all. And again, once you start getting into those higher levels of cultivation and practice, these things become viscerally and experientially obvious. But when you try to put them into words, because our mind is a machine of dualism,

it likes to break things down into its discrete parts and analyze opposites as if they're disconnected, you won't fully be able to grasp it. And that's where, you know, there's a little bit of faith in everything. If you have faith that the Buddha, that people like me have sincerely engaged in this path and have made genuine progress and that while you might not understand exactly where it's going or exactly how it happens, you're going to trust that this general process is legit and will take you somewhere, that sort of faith, that holding that faith lightly,

I think is a really important thing to do from the get-go. Not to take yourself too seriously, but not to be too lazy and to believe that these practices, this eightfold path, has persisted for 2,500 years for a reason. It's not because it doesn't work, and people just like the ideas. It is a science experiment you run in the laboratory of your inner life. And Buddha tells you, if you do these things and you do them from a place of sincerity, and love and compassion, you will get these sorts of results. You will make progress on the overcoming of Duka, of suffering, of unsatisfactoriness.

And it's not through any willed process that you're controlling. It's through the stepping back and becoming aware of how the mind itself operates. And through that glaring clarity, through that increasing awareness of every little machination, of how your mind works, the negative aspects of it fall away of their own accord it's like flashing it's like turning on the kitchen light and watching the cockroaches leave the kitchen light the awareness is the solution you're not doing anything beyond simply becoming aware of how the mind works and that is the process that is being put forward here by the buddha when he talks about the four noble truths and the eightfold path What do you love?

I love it so much. What do you love so much? I love it so much. What do you love? I love it so much that it takes withholding. What do you love? I'm not telling you.

What do you have? do you hide Just look at my face And know that I won't tell What do you love Know that I can't say it Because a half knows no name And I can't try to display it

And there's too much to explain What do you want Just hold out your name What do you want with them just a show of hands? What will you do? I love it so much. It takes with all them. Okay, so first go ahead and find a comfortable place to sit and or lie down. Some people prefer sitting because lying down can often bring them to sleep, particularly if if they're doing this in the morning or late in the evening. So just get comfortable in whatever way works for you. Okay, let's start with a couple of deep breaths.

Breathe in and breathe out. Feel the sensations of breathing in, the chest rising. Feel the sensations of breathing out, the chest lowering. And again, All right, and once you're comfortable, go ahead and close your eyes, sink into your chair or bed. And now I want you to bring to mind somebody that you love unconditionally. somebody in your life whether they're close to you or not so close

that you have an uncomplicated and overwhelmingly positive relationship with again this could be somebody close to you and your family this could be a friend even an acquaintance that you just have generally positive feelings torn conjure up their image in your mind conjure up their smile if you can and once you have them in mind repeat after me inside your head the following words directed at this person may you be happy

may you be safe may you be free from suffering Now, consciously in your own words and in the silence of your mind, continue to wish them well in various ways, in ways that you would put it, perhaps. Just conjure up their image and continue in your inner dialogue silently to yourself, wishing them well in various ways. and notice too that you actually do want them to be happy you do want them to be safe you really at the deepest part of your heart want them to be free from suffering it's not just something you're saying or it's not just a phrase you're repeating it's actually a feeling that you have towards this person cultivate that

Become conscious of that. If you become distracted, if you get lost in thought, notice that, and bring your attention back to these well wishes. May you be safe. May you be happy. may you be free from suffering okay now choose somebody else somebody else you love very much

unconditionally somebody who you have an uncomplicated and overwhelmingly positive relationship with somebody totally different Conjure them up, conjure up them happy, conjure up their smiling face. And inside your head, repeat the same wishes. May you be happy?

May you be safe. May you be free from suffering. When you say these words, notice the feelings associated with them. Notice that you're not just repeating words mindlessly, but in the deepest part of your being, you want this person to be happy, to be free of suffering. Focus on that feeling. Once again, put these well wishes into your own words, continue to say them, and if you get lost in thought, notice that you've been distracted, bring your attention back to the person in the person.

question, their smiling face, and the deep feelings of sincerity you have around wishing them well. In your inner dialogue, silently to yourself, wish yourself to be happy, wish yourself to be safe, wish for yourself to be free from suffering. May I be happy. May I be safe. May I be free from suffering. For those of you who find it particularly difficult to cultivate these feelings toward yourself, try imagining yourself as a child.

Imagine that little boy or that little girl. And imagine that they were going through something difficult and you as an adult could step back in time and comfort yourself, hold yourself. May you be happy. May you be safe. May you be free from suffering. In the last minute of this meditation, drop your thoughts, drop your inner dialogue, attention to the breath. Feel the inhale and the exhale as deeply as you can. Put all your attention on your breath. And if you become lost in thought, notice that. Bring the attention back to the breath and the sensations in the body that breathing causes.

Okay. That is a small and simple meditation known as loving-kindness meditation or meta-meditation. And the point of this meditation in particular is to take the cultivation of loving kindness and compassion into your own hands, to consciously conjure up feelings of wishing others, well-being, and happiness, and then ultimately applying that same thing to yourself. Because what I've noticed a lot on the left, but even just in humans generally, is that many people, many good people, are motivated by a deep sense of love and compassion for other people to change the world. Many people on the revolutionary left, not all but most, are sincerely moved at the suffering of other human beings,

even those human beings who don't look like us, who might talk in different languages than us, who might even be separated in space and time from us, but their suffering in part is ours. Now, our society, of course, teaches you to push those feelings away, to not feel empathy for others, and to make it all about yourself, but what this meditation does is it allows you to cultivate those feelings and then apply them to yourself because as much as there are people on the left who have these huge hearts that want to help other people,

I find in my experience that a lot of those very same people have a very difficult time applying that same level of loving kindness, that same level of compassion towards themselves. They have a hard time being gentle with themselves in the way that they're so readily gentle with small animals, with little children, with suffering people in their lives. A lot of us as children went through various forms of trauma, and that resulted in a lot of us in an inner dialogue that can sometimes become very negative, that you are very hard on yourself. Your inner dialogue can become very negative in its scope, in its dimensions, and what it's concerned about we can often feel unworthy of love of friendship of good things happening to us we put

ourselves down in our own heads so often that for many of us we don't even notice it we just identify with the thoughts that arise in our heads and when those thoughts are negative about ourselves we believe them as if we authored them and so cultivating this loving kindness for others and then being able to apply that to yourself, far from being reifying of individualism, is actually deeply connective. It works against hyperadamization. It works against hyper individualism. By cultivating compassion for others and then for yourself, you can see how human beings have deep suffering in our bodies, in our lives, in our pasts, and that you're not exempt from that either. All of us suffer in our own ways. And it's important that we also understand that we have to take into our own hands the responsibility of being gentle and compassionate with ourselves, of loving ourselves, of not being so hard on ourselves.

And so I hope this little meditation got at that in some way, even if it wasn't a profound experience, even if you felt nothing at all. What these practices do over time is build up the capacity, in this case, for the conscious cultivation of compassion and other cases for the concentration of the mind, for deeper versions of introspection, which we might get to in the future. If anybody listening to this and anybody that sat down and actually did this little meditation likes what I'm doing here, I'll continue to do this on Patreon. on. There's plenty of other guided meditations that I could conduct for people. And if that's something that brings some semblance of contentedness or some, you know, respite from the negativity of their inner dialogue, I'm willing to continue to do that. So please let me know. Please give me your feedback on this and let me know if this is something that I can, that I should continue to do for our patrons. All right. Well, going forward, um, Try to become aware.

You know, this might not apply to you. What I just did right now might have done nothing for you. That's okay. But I'm willing to bet that something stuck out to some of you. And so going forward, one thing that I would recommend is to become aware of the thoughts that you think. Become aware, especially when those thoughts go negative. You know, why are they going negative? Who are they going towards?

What created it? Just bringing that awareness without judgment, without condemning yourself. but just becoming more and more aware of how your mind operates and the machinations it goes through can become an incredibly revealing and ultimately healing process, particularly, particularly when that inner dialogue becomes negative self-talk. So at any time throughout today or tomorrow, if you catch yourself thinking negatively, particularly about yourself,

don't judge yourself for it, don't beat yourself up for it, don't try to stop the thoughts, just become aware of them. Who is talking in your head? Who are you talking to? Who is not worthy? And who's telling you that you're not worthy? These are the basis for a deeper exploration. And there is truth hidden behind these questions.

So I would urge you, if any of this, hit a note with you, to try that simple practice. And again, if people like this, I'll continue to do this in different spheres of the meditative practice. All right. Well, have a good day. Thank you.