Marcel 7 and Erik Z 9 09 28 20

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Transcript

Speaker A: So as far as dreaming goes.

Speaker B: Many.

Speaker A: Many cultures have placed a great deal of emphasis on it. There’s a lot of dreaming stuff that’s done in the Bible. For instance, Joseph and Mary, and they even said that the mother of the Buddha had a dream about a white elephant. So dreaming is a.

Speaker B: Part of our.

Speaker A: Ancient culture that we begin to understand more and more about. And as we do, we begin to understand that it doesn’t hold the significance that humans thought about it in the ancient times, and yet the. The magic and belief systems about dreaming.

Speaker B: Still persist.

Speaker A: So what would the Buddha say then about dreaming? Well, one of the phrases that are used is the phrase of burning by day and smoldering by night.

Speaker C: Smoldering?

Speaker A: Smoldering. What is burning by day and smoldering by night?

Speaker C: What does smoldering mean?

Speaker A: The mind. Oh, smolder like a fire that has been stirred up.

Speaker C: Oh, okay.

Speaker A: Are a fire that maybe it’s got a blanket over it or it’s lacking oxygen. Okay, got it. For instance, a small fire will start to smolder if it’s heavily covered with grass. So when you smother a fire, then it will smolder. It doesn’t go out. And in fact, it may start to blaze up again. But one of the qualities of a smoldering is that it is really smoky. And so this is an analogy. By the way, Eric is calling. Do you mind if I let him in on this call?

Speaker C: Sure.

Speaker A: Okay. I’ll just add him. Hello, Eric, this is. Hello, Marcel.

Speaker C: Hello.

Speaker D: In Germany, it said Marcelo.

Speaker B: Hey.

Speaker C: Yeah, Marcel. Hi.

Speaker D: Hi. Nice to meet you.

Speaker A: And you can tell that Eric is in one of the big homes at Taiwan in Seattle, Washington.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: And so, Eric, if you don’t mind, you can just hang out with us. And we have already started talking about dreaming.

Speaker D: Oh, cool.

Speaker A: And that the way that I’m introducing dreaming is what the Buddha said about it was burning by day and smoldering by night. And what he’s referring to there is the ordinary mind that burns with hindrances.

Speaker B: Through the day and.

Speaker A: And then smolders with hindrances during the night. And the smoldering then would be their dreams at whatever level. Either the dreams that we never are aware of or that we forget all about versus the dreams that we wake up out of. And they seem really big. Normally, psychologists have thought of dreams as working out the problems of today, and that that’s quite common. If in fact, someone goes to sleep thinking about what happened to them in the day, then as they sleep, they’re continuing to dream about what happened in the day. And many will think of that as kind of problem solving. Or bringing the mind to a state of resolution. Or trying to make sense out of the things that happen. But we also know that they don’t happen to be about what happened today. That dreams can also be about what happened tomorrow or what’s going to happen tomorrow. That if we’re worried about tomorrow and.

Speaker B: We go to sleep while we’ve got.

Speaker A: Tomorrow on the mind, then the dreams will have some tomorrow in it. So basically, what we look at is dreaming is restlessness when the mind could be at rest. Now, let’s look at dreaming in three stages. The three stages would be light sleep. The kind of sleep that when we go into it, we can be easily woken back out of it. And that light kind of sleeping is common. We could actually go into the point of being considered in daydreams. For instance, a child is in the class looking out the window, not paying any attention, and the mind goes dull. And then the teacher will say, stop daydreaming, Johnny. And that will be enough to wake him up. Or we can be asleep in a very light way. And it’s actually fairly easy then to wake up from that. But also from that. There’s two layers of sleep that are deeper. One you could call really deep sleep. The kind of sleep that’s restorative. The kind of sleep that is nurturing. But it’s more restorative and more nurturing if it’s getting a lot of oxygen. But mostly what happens at night, and it’s especially true when people wake up in the morning tired, is because they’re not getting enough oxygen during the night. And so what we want to do is to take these things into consideration. Not necessarily to deal with old rings, but to learn how to manage the new ones that we’re going to have in the next few nights or in the future. So let’s look at it from this perspective, that there’s that intermediate step between the light sleep and the deep sleep that the scientists have called REM or REM sleep. And the REM actually means rapid eye movements where the eyes will move back and forth. We can see that in the human. But there’s also other movements. You can actually tell when dogs are dreaming. The dogs dream, too. And you can tell because they will just in the night or while they’re sleeping. They’ll let out a cry like a. The end of their paws moving is out. Like they’re either out in the chase or they’re being chased but even dogs have dreams.

Speaker B: Now, like I said in the really, really old days, dreams they.

Speaker A: Thought were significant, that dreams were trying to tell us something. Well, if we can say that, yes, perhaps they’re so. But remember that the mind is the source of these dreams, so the teller is still the mind anyway, that we.

Speaker B: Have to get right out of the.

Speaker A: Way of having any magical thinking. And there’s been many, many famous dreams that had to do with magical thinking. Possibly one of the most famous dreams of all is Muhammad laying in bed someplace in Medina, having a dream about him being in Jerusalem riding a winged horse up to various levels of heaven. And that in the Muslim traditions they see this dream that Mohammed had while he was in Medina as rationale for why the Muslims should own Jerusalem is because that’s where he rode the winged horse in his dream up to heaven and back. Another famous dream is called the Stair Steps to Heaven where Joseph had a dream and then the pharaoh had dreams. And that’s in fact how Joseph got into being a court administrator, was because he was able to interpret dreams that the pharaoh had that no one else could interpret, which was basically, I think about five very fat cattle being eaten up by seven very lean cattle, which indicates that seven years of plenty is going to be destroyed by seven years of famine. So these dreams that humans have had, we try to relate them to the future. But the kind of dreams that we really need to look at are the kind of dreams that bring great feelings, like the feelings of fear or feelings of anger that some people can say.

Speaker B: They wake up in a cold sweat.

Speaker A: Because they’re being, let us say, chased by monsters, or that there is a nebulous kind of unknown attacker or whatever like this.

Speaker B: The people who have these kind of dreams mostly are children, or they start.

Speaker A: Out having these dreams as children and.

Speaker B: Then they continue to have these dreams.

Speaker A: And one of the ways of looking at that is that the individual is trying to work out his fear in.

Speaker B: The sense that he’s got this fear and he’s trying to make sense out.

Speaker A: Of it, in the sense of trying.

Speaker B: To figure out what it is that he’s afraid of, what’s attacking him, how.

Speaker A: Is he going to get some understanding of the fear? So one of the things that we can do in the Buddha’s way is.

Speaker B: To say these dreams are really not that important because they’re not any more important than the daytime fears that we have, that if there’s anything, it’s only a matter of intensity, or let us say, even perceived intensity that let us Say it like this, that a teenager can be attacked by the bully and.

Speaker A: Experience the fear of that. But it’s only in the night, when.

Speaker B: He rebuilds that image, that he feels.

Speaker A: Completely terrified or that he feels overwhelmed.

Speaker B: By the sensation of the fear that’s coming out of the dream.

Speaker A: But one of the things that we can say about dreams is that we.

Speaker B: Can only do things in dreams that we can do during the daytime with.

Speaker A: Our feelings and our emotions and our thoughts. That there’s nothing special about a dream.

Speaker B: Other than we’re not very conscious of.

Speaker A: It.

Speaker B: And that it leads. Let us say the residue is more of a residue of feelings and sensations rather than residue of information that how.

Speaker A: One feels about the dream is actually more significant than the details of the dream.

Speaker B: And yet when people talk about their dreams, they always tell about the details.

Speaker A: Of it without making a whole lot of information about how I felt and what was going on. Now we also have the understanding about fear is that it has a quality of paralysis.

Speaker B: What we mean by that is that it’s part of our instinctual nature to freeze. A good example of that would be when humans, in years long past with primitive, let us say, our primitive war.

Speaker A: Equipment, that when we would run across.

Speaker B: A big animal such as a rhinoceros. Rhinoceros don’t have good eyesight. If they do see you, they will attack you. So your best defense is to not be seen. This is true in all kinds of things. Okay, don’t be seen. So if in fact you’re exposed in the scenery, let us say hiding in plain sight, then the way that you’re going to catch the attention of a predator is by moving. Therefore, those humans that were developing human skills when they ran away from predators way back when, they got eaten, leaving only the rest of us who were paralyzed with fear to survive. So this survival instinct of freezing is deeply, deeply buried. And so when we’re dealing with fear in a dream, it may give us the feeling that we can’t move. That’s in fact, that becomes part of the dream state, is that we’re frozen. We’re frozen with paralysis because of the dream itself. Now the question is, how much and how soon can we wake up? Because the dreaming is in this intermediate stage, what we call REM sleep, or the kind of sleeping that the dogs do, that you can tell they’re dreaming. It’s not only just easy to tell, but it’s humorous. We actually like it when we catch.

Speaker A: The dog dreaming and we’ll watch him.

Speaker B: To see what he’s doing. Well, in the human night, we don’t. We don’t generally have that. We don’t have the ability to watch each other dream. Not much. And so most of the work has to be done later by investigation and reviews and whatnot like that. But what we found out is that this deep layer of sleep is the part of sleep that’s restorative for the body and the mind. The repair work and all of that kind of stuff is almost something like that. If you’re going to change the hard drive in a PC, you got to shut the darn thing down. All right? So deep sleep is like shutting down things so that we can do some restoring.

Speaker A: Your work.

Speaker B: Pardon?

Speaker D: Maintenance.

Speaker B: Maintenance, Right. Nightly maintenance. We need that maintenance every night because all day long the movements of the mind and the body and all of that builds up a kind of residue or poison. Just like an engine on a car, the old kind would that they get dirty on the inside. Even though the exhaust will throw out almost all of the carbon oil mixtures and whatnot, there’s still some residue. And so in the night, this is the part of the cleaning job that is done. And this is a state that’s below the dreaming. Now, normally when a regular person wakes up, let us say, because they’re disturbed by something in the night, that for going from this deep level of sleep, some people tend then to move through the REM sleep into the light sleep, into fully waking up. And that even though fully waking up has various layers to it also. And so what happens when we’re waking woke up out of a dream, or that we’re in kind of the dream state as we’re waking up? This is what we call lucid dreaming, which means that we can really see the dream itself, except that the lucid dreaming is just more like normal daylight thinking. Only the thing about it being dreamy is that we came into it out of the dream state. In other words, we’re waking up while we’re still in that dream state. But there’s something else very significant that happens many times, and that is that if we are in a very, very deep slate of sleep and a noise happens or something will be touching us, like say, a bug bites in the night or something, then instead of waking up from that deep level of sleep, we will wake up into a dream sleep. And what we’ll do is we’ll take that noise or whatever and incorporate it into our dream. And so that we’ll hear that noise. It could be a siren. And so we hear that siren and we Incorporate that into a dream, and then we wake up to recognize that, no, that siren is actually real.

Speaker A: That.

Speaker B: We’Re not dreaming it. All right, so these are normal functions. Now let’s look at it from the perspective of Adama, dude, the way that we’re going to manage this information, knowing that we are going to sleep at night, we’re not going to stop sleeping. We had a bad dream, but there’s no reason to continue having bad dreams. Or if we have a dream, why should we call it bad? And if we have a bad dream, why should we think it be significant that, in fact, all we’re doing in that dream state is the same things that we do during the wakeful state, except that we’re not quite as much aware of it because we’re asleep. Excuse me, vagrants of a. So for the Dharma dude, getting ready to go to sleep and having, let us say, some things to do, and the way that we’re going to deal with the night and then the waking up in the morning. And so before you called, Eric, Marcel and I were discussing the point about when did he start the deep breathing? And he started the deep breathing after the paralysis had ended. While he was in a state of paralysis. It was hard to get the breathing going. But in fact, if you can remember to do the breathing, the breathing itself will bring one out of the paralysis. Because the paralysis is not kind of real. The paralysis is just more part of the dream of being frozen with fear than the fear is a dream state. And that by thinking about it and talking about it and breathing through it, et cetera like that, we begin to understand that, oh, things are okay, that was just a dream, nothing special. But as we progress, we’re going to progress in the way of operating so that we can go into a deep state of sleep and then be able to come out of that deep slate easily without having to go through the dreamy state in the middle. So that we’re able to go from an ordinary wakeful mind into sleep and very quickly and easily go into a deep state, get the restorative qualities that we need, and then wake back up again. And so we’re going to start planning on bypassing this sleep state so that when people are practiced, they say, no, don’t. Don’t dream much, and we’ll have a dream about once every six weeks or a month or maybe five or six months, or maybe it’ll be a year or more before we’ll have a dream. Because for one thing, even if there is a bit of Dream state. It’s not really significant, not important at all. In fact, the only time that dreams have ever been significant is because people remember them. If we have a very, very light dream, or let us say, don’t spend much time in that intermediate realm state, then the dreams are not going to be much. And so this is the idea. Let’s be able to go into the deep state and stay there until it’s time to come out, and then we can come out of that deep state easily in ordinary mind, though, will spend a lot of time in that dreamy state. And it looks like that that’s because the mind seems to have a problem, problem that it’s trying to work out. Einstein remarked that many times he had a math problem or something that he was trying to get a solution for. He even had a thing he called thought experiments. But he recognized that if he could go to sleep and get into really deep sleep, that when he woke up in the morning because his mind was clean and fresh, that the answer to that math problem would come very easily for him. If we can get the deep sleep that we need, then the mind will function. But if the mind is spending a lot of time in the dream sleep trying to work out old problems, it naturally don’t get work worked out. And almost always these old problems, like I said, some of them are only as old as the day, and some of them are old only because today I’m planning on having a problem tomorrow. But when we begin to get that out of the way, then older things will start to come up in dream form. This also happens, by the way, in a meditation retreat that the first few days the student is concerned about the world and how he got into the retreat and what he’s not doing now that he did when he was before the retreat. And then at the end of the retreat, they get to plan back for the world again. I’ve got to leave. I’m going to go do this, that, and the other thing when I get out of the retreat. So that lives only the middle part of the retreat, where the students are not dealing with the present world. And then they start dealing with really old stuff that comes up in the mind. Old problems, old things which again, the Buddha says to forget about that stuff. The past is done. There’s nothing in the past that has much value for us. And yet the meditators say, yeah, well, wait a minute, you can say that if you want to, but I’m left with all of these deep feelings that arise from those old days. So what we can do, for one thing, is to assure ourselves that these dreams don’t mean anything. They’re not much, just some old baggage, perhaps even the dropping away of old baggage. It’s almost like this is a time to say goodbye to those old fears. And so we kind of, in the dream, visit them once or twice. But the way to manage this, to have a really good evening, is kind of a plan in advance on it then. In fact, there are suttas about this, and there’s also details and bits and pieces of information in several other sutras. One of the qualities that we’re looking for is that to be mindful of the body, which we mean by kaya nupasana in all of our postures, if we’re going to be doing it in all of our postures, that means that whatever posture we’re in, that’s the time for doing kaya nupasana, or mindfulness of the body. Now, in the Mahasi method, they talk about it in the sense of rising, falling, touching, sitting. The one that we’re looking at today is the sitting. The rising and the falling is nothing.

Speaker A: But a deep breath.

Speaker B: That deep breath does not have to be just in the abdomen, by the way. You can actually feel the shoulders rise when you’re filled up with air, and the shoulders will fall a bit. So there’s a lot of movement in the body associated with the breathing, the rising and the falling. And then the touching is the sense touch. You can feel the fabric of the cloth of your shirt. You can feel the headphones on the ears. You can feel all kinds of things that touch the body. But then we have this deep proprioceptic that shows more of the position of the body. And anytime that you become aware of it or think of it, you can think of and know what the entire position of every part of the body is. You know where the hands are, you know where the feet are, you know where the knees are. Whether you’re sitting or standing or walking or laying down, we always know where the body is. That’s that proprioceptic system that we have inside. And this is something to pay a lot of attention to when we have, let us say, the mindfulness, or we remember to do so. So when we’re laying in bed at night, the thing to do is to become aware of the body’s posture. When we first lay down to go to sleep. It’s almost like that when we lay down, we’re going to lay down to do anapanasati, except that we’re Laying down to do it with the intention of getting into a night’s sleep, which means to clean out the mind. All right? So cleaning out the mind and telling ourselves, tonight’s gonna be a really, really good night. There’s no place to go, nothing to do. Everything is cool and comfortable. Even if I don’t go to sleep, at least it will be restful. And I’ve got nothing to do for the next eight or nine hours or so. Everything.

Speaker A: That’s the Thai word that I like.

Speaker B: Just easy going, all right, Easy peasy. Everything is hunky dory.

Speaker A: We’ve got all of these words for.

Speaker B: It, these childlike words, and we want to use these. You can reflect in the night as you’re going to sleep with things like, wow, this is really a nice life. Wow, what a good family I have. Wow, this is a really easy place to live. These are the kind of thoughts to get the mind into a complete state of satisfaction as we drift off to sleep, which means now we’re free from hindrances. If, in fact, we go to sleep thinking about something, then that will leave the mind in a position to continue to dream. In other words, what happens if the mind is spinning as we’re going to sleep? Then as we go into sleep, that spinning will still be there until it finally rests and stops when we get down to that deep level of sleep. So our idea as a meditator is let’s put that spinning mind to rest while we’re still awake, so that as we go into sleep, we can bypass that REM stage so that we don’t have to go into that state of sleep. But we’re going to do something else, too. We’re going to say, all right, I’m going to maintain a certain amount of awareness. I’m not going to go all the way to sleep. I’m going to leave only enough awareness to know what body posture I’m in. Now. One of the things that a lot of people don’t understand, they think that, oh, I need eight hours of sleep, solid eight hours of sleep. Where in fact, that doesn’t happen anyway. That people, in fact, will go up and down, up and down, up and down. Dogs live a natural life like that. So they sleep part of the night and they’re up part of the night. And during the day, they’re sleeping, they take naps. And so being up and down and up and down is our normal way of looking at it. You could also see that in really, really ancient times, when we did have to guard the Nest that someone would wake up during the night. In fact, not just in the military, but if you had a wagon train or even if you’re a ship at sea, in all of those cases, you’re going to have to have guards. You got to have somebody awake during the night. So that means that our sleep is naturally, because of the way in our lifestyle from primitive times, is that the human being does not like modern science thinks, oh, you turn the lights off, you go to sleep, and you don’t wake up until in the morning. No, really, we do wake up during the night and that one of the things that we’re going to do is to remind ourselves that all our posture needs to be worked on through the night. Now, the posture that I’m talking about is what is called, surprisingly enough, the lion’s pose. And what that means is that you can see the way that the lion lays. He lays on a right side or the left side with his paws out and fully relaxed on his side. Lions very rarely will sleep on their back, and they will very rarely sleep on their stomach with what you would call the pose of the Sphinx. Lions don’t sleep in the pose of the sphinx. They lay on their side. Now, surprisingly enough, almost all animals who do that, who sleep at night do that posture. Even the dogs have the posture. But I don’t think that it would be auspicious to call it the dog’s posture. So we call it the lion’s posture.

Speaker A: Excuse me.

Speaker B: So the lion’s posture basically means that we lay down on the side. If you Google lion’s pose or the reclining Buddha or something like that, you can get a huge number of photos of icons and images and statues of Asia. It’s got some characteristics. One is that the knees are bent just a little bit to where some of them, let us say lionized lion posture. The body is completely straight. But in the sutras, it talks about that the legs are. The knees are bent and that one leg is laying over the other because of the camera. I won’t show you the feet, but you can put it kind of like this. Okay, that one foot comes out like that, and then the other one will lay over it this way. Very comfortable position for the head. You can have a pillow or your arm. Or in the old days, the monks would use their Sanghati robe like that as a pillow to have the head elevated. Because if you’re. If you’re laying on your side and the head is not elevated, then it’ll get a crick in the neck. So you want to keep the head elevated. But the important point is that we’re going to remember to maintain this posture through the night so that if we roll over, because it’s quite natural for the body to roll over during the night. If you don’t believe me when we talk about it natural, go look at any child, any child from the age of 2 into the age of 8, 10, 12, they’re just all over the bed. And in fact, in the west, for various reasons, they want to put the young child in its own bed, even in its own room, which then leaves the child alone and often fearful. So a lot of childhood dreams that have to do with fear has to do with the fact that the child has been separated from mom and dad. In Thailand, we actually have an 8 year old, she’s a big girl and she flounders all over the bed just like a child would do. But she still sleeps in the same bed with us, or she sleeps in the same room with us because we got two beds and so we’re actually mobile as to which bed we’re going to sleep in. But the point is that children are just all over the bed. But I want to make also the additional point. Point is that if the child is allowed to sleep with the parents through their childhood, or at least in the same room with their parents, then they do not have so much fear in the night that they’re secure. Mom’s right here. And so children who are able to sleep with their parents tend to not then have monsters in the closet. They don’t make up things like that to be afraid. But the natural fear of being separated from the parents is the real issue of the fear. The monsters in the closet is trying to make sense out of. Why do I feel afraid when I’m alone? So part of our going to sleep, then if we have terrors in the night from our childhood or whatever, we need to tell ourselves not only is this a good night, but that it’s a safe place. This is a good place for me to sleep. It’s safe, it’s secure. Now, you know that inherently or you wouldn’t be sleeping there. So that’s not the point that I’m making. It’s that we need to have that on our mental plate as we go to sleep, that that’s our last lunch or dinner of the night. Our happy thoughts that are secure, wholesome, healthy. In other words, we go to sleep in that state that is at least closely tied to, if not actually first, Jana, where we’re secure we’re safe. The mind is free from the hindrances, and that the body is relaxed and comfortable.

Speaker A: All right.

Speaker B: And that we want to repeat that little ritual, which takes two, three, five minutes, it depends. But just lay there. Sometimes it takes a long time. In fact, the more skill in meditation and the more mindfulness you have, the longer it will take you to go to sleep. But that’s okay. It really is, because the time that it takes to go into sleep is marvelous moments. And so we lay there in bed just really, really happy and survive and enjoy the night knowing that sleep will come on its own and that it’s not to be forced. But a lot of people will tell themselves if they can’t get to sleep in five or minutes or whoa, oh, I’ve got to get to sleep tonight. And so they’ll put a lot of hurry up and a lot of desire and a lot of other stuff in that. And this is something we have to make sure that, no, we’re not going to set ourselves up for bad dreams. We’re going to set ourselves up for being completely happy and content all through the night without any need for dreams. So that when we drink, we do wake up. We wake up out of that deep state into conscious awareness. Now, there is actually training that has been done through the centuries to promote that. The place that we find this, though, is normally in places like military, like in Zindos or in Shaolin or Buddhist monasteries where they teach a really active meditation like mar martial arts. And that’s when the master is going to sneak into the dojo with his Zen stick in the middle of the night. And who is he going to hit with that Zen stick? He’s going to hit the guy who doesn’t wake up upon the Zen master coming into the room. In other words, they do at night the same technique that they do in the Zendo when the students are beginning meditation, when they. When they are not aware that the Zen master is standing behind them, that’s when the Zen master is going to hit them with that stick. But if someone is aware that the Zen master is there and give him just enough notice that we know that he’s there, an example of that is just sitting up just a little bit. But if you’re completely out of it, if you’re not watching what’s going on, if we are, in fact, even in deep jhanas, the Jhna dude’s going to get hit. Why? Because he too, is not aware that the Zen master is right behind him. If he’s in one of those kind of jhnas. But if he is, in fact, in the kind of jhna that we’re talking about, this first Jhna, which is filled with sensory awareness that we know what’s going on around us, then we can wake up in the night to avoid the Zen stick, because you can naturally understand that the reason for that is that it may not be the Zen master coming in with the Zen stick. It may be the rival kings, ninjas coming in. In that case, if you don’t wake up, you’re dead in your bed. And so this is why it has that quality of the martial arts or of the military, is because in some cases, waking up is a survival issue directly. If you don’t wake up, you’re dead. That can happen with a predator, too. If a predator breaks into the den, let us say that you’re in a den of wolves and you’re one of the puppies that are laying in the back of the den, and all the other dogs got out of the den and ran away from the predator. Guess who gets eaten? The sleeping pup. That’s what gets eaten. All right, so we. We want to make sure then that we take on this real attitude that sometimes it’s important to wake up. And we do. We wake up during the night. So when you wake up in the middle of the night and you don’t have to wake up very much, just enough to recognize that your posture has shifted and that you’ll get back into that lion’s pose and get yourself all snuggly again and feel really good and comfortable. Nowhere to go, nothing to do, and then the mind will drift back into a nice sleep. So this is the method that we’re using also. Whenever we wake up, this is a time again for Anapanosati. We want to take a few deep breaths because during the night the breathing will get very shallow. But if you can wake up through the night six, seven, eight times during the night, once a 30 minutes or once an hour, something like that, and take a few deep breaths, then the body will be able to do the repairs that it has. So it’s much better to go from the surface to deep, then back to the surface and deep, and then back to the surface and deep. But we don’t do it like that. We do. Instead of from the surface, we go down and into this rim state. We stay there far. Then we’ll go and do a little bit of deep sleep. And when we wake up, we don’t wake up all the Way we wake back up into this REM sleep level, which is another way of saying it’s nothing but daydreams and the night. And so this is why the Buddha calls it smoldering by night, burning with the fires of sensuality and the hindrance during the day. And then we take that into the night and start smoldering in the night. So this technique that we’ve been talking about will help interrupt that pattern that we’re going to intentionally get the mind as clean as we can so that we’re not giving that dreamer state any fodder. Okay? The way that you go into sleep, this very, very happy, contented state will affect how you sleep. So if you go to sleep worried, you’re going to have a worried night. If you work, if you go to sleep with fear, you’re going to have a fearful night. And so this is the way to manage that is never mind the dreams that we had last night, that’s not important. That’s gone already. The question is, how can we deal with tonight, this next night, when we lay down again? We’re going to lay down in great comfort. We’re going to get ourselves into the lion’s pose, sleeping on our side. Now, I have heard some say that only the right side is conducive, that the left side is somehow, you know, like left, right, and good, bad. The right is good and the left is bad, you know, and so in politics, the left wing is automatically bad people. It’s us right wingers who refuse to change. Even the dirtiest of our laundry is kept with the word right. But in our sleep, it’s good for you to experiment with left and right, but in fact, there’s actually some very, very slight advantages to sleeping on the left side. And that has to do with the heart itself, that if you’re laying on your left side, then the heart is here, pumping up through the jugular on this left side. And it’s very, very conducive. Also very easy to breathe. But it’s actually much easier to breathe on both the left and the right side, as opposed to on the back. That, in fact, you know, that when the coronavirus started and that people were filling the ICUs and a lot of people were dying with COVID The reason that they found that people were dying of COVID was because of the traditional hospital beds, because of their elevations and their tools and all of that stuff, that people were required to sleep on their backs and to lay in the bed on their backs. Guess what? Back in the back Here in this, in the areas around the back, in the kidney areas and down and around, there is a lot of the lower lungs that become collapsed when we’re laying on our back so that we can’t breathe properly when we’re laying on our backs anyway. And yet that’s the traditional hospital way. They actually started saving lives by doing two major things. One is to keep the people on oxygen and not put them on ventilators. And number two was to rolling them over on their sides or on. There’s another posture, this kind of halfway between laying on the side and laying on the stomach. And that is where you’re kind of half propped, but you still get plenty of oxygen. If you’re laying flat on your, on your stomach or flat on your chest, then when you’re breathing, you’ve got to move the whole body to breathe. If you’re laying on your back, half the lungs are collapsed anyway. And that was what was calling a lot of people to die was because of breathing. But when they started rolling people over on their sides and giving them oxygen so that what legs they had left could do their proper job, then the survival rate started to climb again. It was a matter of posture. And the Buddha knew about this 2500 years ago, and yet we don’t talk about it even enough. In meditation, perhaps the first thing that they should do on the first day of a retreat, a lot of them have before the first day of the retreat. The first day of the retreat starts early in the morning. And so the registration day or the orientation day part of the orientation of the retreat. On that very first talk, they should teach the students how to lay down in the bed for a proper meditation so that they can practice their meditation in all of the postures, not just in the sitting posture that we want to practice this. And so whatever posture we’re in, we should be aware of that posture. Well, how do we do that? Is with this proprioceptive system that we know. When I point this out, every student knows it. If the student is really slow, then we’ll say, okay, do this, close your eyes and, and take one arm and wave it in the air. And then stop waving it, open your eyes, look at your arm. And don’t you know exactly where it was? You knew where it was before you opened your eyes. You do not have to look at your body to see what posture it’s in. There’s some deep sensing system that gives us all of that information. And not only that, but that’s what makes us agile. So that we can dance so that lions can go on the chase. All of that is because the animal knows exactly where all of his feet are. But it’s done in a very, very high speed level because it’s all happening in the back anterior cortex of the mind, all of these body positions and movements and whatever like that. In fact, there’s an additional piece of thing in the mind called the cochlea that has to do with balance. We could not walk, we could not balance ourselves or do anything without this proprioceptive information going to the brain in this area of the brain of balance, so that we know the positions of our body. Because we know this. This should become part of the meditation all the time. But it’s especially important when we’re laying in bed at night. The number one thing for us to keep track of is the position of the body, knowing that we as like started off in children when we were in the night. We flail around just like the dog does when it’s dreaming. And so we need to then start watching the body to maintain its posture, knowing that in the night you’re going to roll out of the posture so you can have the thought, I’m going to maintain this posture and I’m going to wake up if I come out of this posture. And so we begin to attune to the body, we attune to being in the bed. We attend to the present moment right here, right now, and we throw out all of the kind of verbal thoughts that would become fodder for dreaming. This way, students begin to dream less and less. They don’t worry about the dreams. They’re not worth anything. I mean, why should we worry about the thoughts that I had at 9:03pm and then worry about the ones that I had at 1:45pm or am well, one of them was a dream. Therefore it’s significant and important and who knows, not dreams are not important. They’re just what we do at night when we’re upset, when we’re in fright at night. Then we will have dreams to try to make sense out of the feelings that we have. It’s better to deal with those feelings while we’re fully awake. But we can’t say, okay, well, I’m going to get fully awake and deal with all my feelings and then I’ll sleep. That may take weeks. We’re not going to do it like that. We’re going to do it in the sense of when I’m laying in bed to go to sleep at night. We’re going to do that in a really, really comfortable, happy way and stay out of all of that other stuff. And that when I’m sitting in meditation or when anxiety and fears come up, then that’s the time to really deal with them in the sense of breathing into it and letting that fear go and other things like this. And so this is the kind of practice that we would go for. And about that dreaming being unimportant. The same thing is true for experiences that we come up with in meditation, that when we’re sitting in meditation, sometimes the mind will get dreamy instead of alert. And these dreamy states that people have when they’re sitting in meditation, they will often misinterpret. The Christians will interpret their, their sitting meditations in one way and that same kind of experience by a Buddhist will be experienced and spoken about in some other way. Let me give you an example of that. The Buddhist meditators will in fact think that they’ve had a past life experience because they’re sitting there thinking of something and the clothes or whatever are strange. The Christian will have one of these experiences and think that he’s in communication with God or he’s sitting in God’s lap or something like this. And so these are the kinds of things that we do with this to try to introduce, interpret these states. And the Buddha’s answer to that is, don’t try to make sense out of them or interpret them. They’re over. Now let’s work about how can we be aware of what’s going on the next time that that stuff happens, rather than giving it any significance now. So we deal with dreams and past life experiences and meditation experiences all the same way. Just note it, there it is and let it go, let it pass. We’ve got a new moment to live in now. And so always when, as soon as we wake up, we check our posture, we take a deep breath, and we do that part of Anapanasati, the gladdening the mind. Wow, this is so nice. We wake up at three in the morning and we say, wow, okay, I don’t check the clock, but some might. And you check the clock at 3am and the answer to that is, oh, I’ve got another three hours to sleep, no place to go. Isn’t that marvelous? I can just lay here for the next three hours and then perhaps drift back into sleep. Other people will wake up and say, 3am I have to get some sleep.

Speaker D: Oh, poor me.

Speaker B: Oh, poor me, right, I’m up in the middle of the night. No, we want to Actually wake, because this is quite natural, is to start noting when in fact you are not asleep in the night, because you do wake up and then go back and then you wake up again and go back. And many of us, when we wake up, we don’t wake up fully. We wake up only into a dream sleep that whatever should have woken us up, like the Zen master coming into the room, we just incorporate him into a dream. We have known that for many, many years. And in fact, the first time that I ever became aware of this was by watching the cartoon when I was a child. And it was one of these cartoons to where all I remember was, is that someone was on board ship having really, really terrible things happen to him. And then in the the cartoon, it revealed that some of his friends were tickling his feet with feathers and he felt that he was walking on fire or something like that. And so this is the example that we, that we recognize that things will happen in the night and that we will take those things and incorporate them into a dream. Where in fact, what we should do is wake up altogether to recognize what was that? What was that noise? So that we can tell ourselves, that’s okay, there’s nothing here worth dreaming about. Let’s move back into a deeper level of sleep. And you have an ample opportunity to do this, both of you. In fact, it’s evening time, and especially you, you’re in Germany, so you’ve got a bit of a day left, but whenever you go to sleep, take this new way of doing it. So we’re going to be working when we lay down throughout the night, and then when we wake up in the morning, something new, which is what I was questioning you on in the beginning, and that is as soon as we wake up in the morning, the, the very first thing that we want to do is check our posture and to check our breathing. Let’s start taking a few deep breaths. The first thing we do, we wake up in the morning is we’ll take a few deep breaths and tell ourselves, my, how marvelous it is to just lay here in bed. Everything is hunky dory, everything survive, survive. And then we can wake up and get up. So even in the morning when we wake up, there are various levels of this. Begin to notice how awake are you. Are you completely awake yet? Are you only awake enough to get your breathing going and your posture, or are you going to be fully awake? In boot camp in the west, the drill sergeant will come in at three minutes before 6am making a lot of noise, banging his Baton yelling at the top of his lungs. You know this. And what does everybody do in the barracks? They immediately jump out of bed, right? But us civilians, we don’t do that anymore. So having that idea that when we wake up in the morning, we want to be awake. And so waking up, that’s an important quality. When we wake up, am I awake yet? Now, this can be a decision. You can say, I’m going to lay here and enjoy it. Or you can say, right up, we got, off we go. But many people instead will take, oh, poor me, oh, I didn’t get enough rest, and now I’ve got to get up and I’m tired. And you can see that kind of attitude is going to set the whole day. And so we want to make sure that when we wake up in the morning, we wake up refreshed, that we’re ready to go. And so this is the way that we would spend the night, knowing that it’s okay that you’re going to wake up in the night. And when you do, we’re going to check our breathing, we’re going to check our posture, and. And we’re going to check our mind state and then just enjoy the night, knowing that we’ll go back to sleep. So this is about all that I have to say about it. But we can talk about other postures throughout the day, but this one in the night is an important one because we do spend quite a number of hours that way. And most people don’t get good value out of their sleep at all. And so when they get sick, it’s very slow to get well again. When we’re active and tired, we stay tired. We don’t get the rest that we need in the night because we spend all our times dreaming, trying to solve problems. Problems. And so this new way of sleeping, which is actually anapanasati, in the prone position. Now, I know that some masters say, don’t meditate while you’re laying in bed, but that’s not a good point. He’s actually making a point that, oh, I want you in this retreat to be here sitting in the meditation hall, not sleeping, lying to yourselves about that. You’re meditating in the sack. Okay? So I can understand and appreciate that. But we’re not talking about being in a retreat and formal practice of meditation. We’re talking about how to incorporate our formal practice throughout the day, including how to go to sleep at night, so that the mind is going to be clean and clear enough that it can, in fact, do the job of restoring the body the way that we need, even though it’s going to be interrupted, it’s going to be up and down. In fact, this is a good thing to note, to start recognizing that you do wake up in the night. You just don’t wake up very much. But now we’re going to wake up a little bit more to look at the posture and look at the breathing to make sure that the mind has not got some work to do. No, it’s completely free from any. Nothing to do, no place to go. Just lay here and just enjoy. So, Marcel, do you think that this is going to be of use to you?

Speaker C: Yes, I.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker C: And I got something to think about than thinking about the fear.

Speaker B: Don’t think about the fear. Not while you’re in bed at night. Let that go. Don’t think about the content of the brain. Yeah.

Speaker C: It’s more about the fear of getting to sleep because of what will come.

Speaker B: Exactly. Right. Yeah. Don’t worry about what kind of nightmares you’re going to have in the night, because you’re not going. In fact, you’re perfect there. Thank you for mentioning that. I didn’t think about to say that if we are worried that we will have a nightmare, you will have one. You’re actually setting it up. You’re programming.

Speaker D: So dreams, in a way. Actually kind of like the mind shadow, huh?

Speaker B: I could say that. But it’s actually most useful to just recognize what the Buddha said with burning by day and smoldering by night. It’s just the mind just smoldering.

Speaker D: Okay.

Speaker B: Just like a fire that’s not getting enough air. It just smolders and smokes, but it’s still hot, still burning. All right, well, let’s finish this talk. Now. I’m thinking that we’ve got this topic pretty well covered, and it incorporates right into our practice. In fact, if you look in the room that you’re in there, Eric, you will probably find at least one statue of a reclining Buddha. Somewhere in there, you will find seven different statues. One will be the statue of Enlightenment where you’ve got the snakes over his head. Another news where he’s reclining. There’s actually seven different. And this one Buddha for each day of the week.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: And so there will be these seven Buddhas there, and one of them is the reclining boot. I think that one’s Saturday. But also, I invite you to Google Reclining Buddha, because Google’s got literally hundreds and hundreds of photos of images throughout the world. All right, so if there’s no more questions about this, I’ll end it up. I got another student waiting.

Speaker D: Okay.

Speaker B: Marcel, this has been delightful. I’ve really enjoyed it. Good to see you again, Derek.

Speaker C: Thank you very much.

Speaker D: Thank you.

Speaker C: Bye.

Speaker B: All righty. Bye.

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