Jesse asks, in the tradition I've been practicing, Bhante Gunaratana has told me not to note mental phenomena such as thinking, itching, etc.
Because it is likely you will become fixated on the words, fixated on the mental noting.
I've noticed you teach this practice.
Would you eventually have people deviate from this practice to examine the mental phenomena without notation, simply the sensations?
No.
No, never.
Not in my life, not in your life.
Not in my life anyway.
Never have, never will.
I want to make that clear because some people ask this question.
They want to come and they say, is there some point where you'll tell us to stop?
And no, I won't.
Not unless I get some instruction otherwise from my teacher.
But I can't understand the point of it.
I've heard so much about this noting thing.
I used to give talks about this because it was so funny.
I said, I've heard people tell me that noting is samatha meditation, not noting is vipassana.
I've heard people tell me that not noting is samatha, noting is vipassana.
I've heard people tell me that
noting inhibits concentration, prevents you from developing concentration.
I've heard people tell me that noting gives you too much concentration.
Everyone has an opinion about it.
And it's quite funny to listen to all these opinions.
I mean, the Buddha's teaching is Ehi Pasika.
You come and see, and if it does cause you to fixate on the words, then go and find another teacher.
I've never seen that with my students.
I've led hundreds of people through courses.
I've seen my teacher lead hundreds of people through courses.
I've never seen anybody get fixed.
I have seen one person get fixated on words, not the words.
She was using the wrong words.
She started saying, wisdom, wisdom.
She went totally crazy.
This woman was totally temporarily insane.
And, you know, the ten cups of coffee that she'd had the night before probably had something to do with it.
And the interference with people who are not her teachers had something to do with it.
And lots of things contributed to this.
And mostly just her state of mind that was not stable.
I stayed with her four nights in a mental hospital in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
It was interesting watching her.
Wisdom, wisdom.
She'd say to me, you are my wisdom.
Wisdom, wisdom.
because she still had this idea of how to acknowledge.
If you're just using, if you are fixating on the words, then you're not practicing meditation, and you should acknowledge the fixating.
The fixating, as Bahá'u'lláh said, if you're investigating, say investigating.
But more important in such situations where you think you're fixating or you feel you're fixating, is to look at the feeling, look at the judgment of the practice.
As I said earlier, that's 90% of the time, or
almost all the time that's the problem.
Your practice is fine, but then you start to doubt it.
Because we doubt things, we doubt everything.
When the doubt comes up, acknowledge the doubting.
You'll see just like everything else, it disappears.
And you'll see that it disappears.
How can you fixate on the words?
You're watching the doubting.
And you say to yourself, doubting, doubting, oh, the doubting's gone.
That's what you'll see.
Isn't that what we're trying to see, impermanence?
If all you see is the words, then you've got a problem.
I remember when I first started, it was true.
When I first started, all I saw were words in my head.
A very visual person.
Seeing, seeing, and boom, there'd be a word in my head.
Seeing, seeing.
I had crazy practice, my first practice.
I heard them talk about the middle way and so I tried to envision this line down the middle of my body and I was trying to open this up I saw this white line and I was like trying to get into the middle way somehow I got a big headache and my teacher was saying you know it's like practice is like a hammer or something that's why I got this big headache and I started to visualize my brain and I was like hitting it with a hammer trying to break it open
Oh, everything he said to me, I was just visualizing it.
It was pretty terrible.
But there's only one answer to that.
When you see something, say to yourself, seeing.
In the beginning, everything's going to be crazy.
You're not going to practice correctly at all.
No one will.
But eventually, once you start to get the hang of it, you'll see that the noting is a very important part of the practice.
I mean, if that were the case, then a mantra meditation would be useless.
The word mantra would never have come into popular usage.
But a mantra does have power.
It does focus your mind on an object, whatever the object be.
The Visuddhimagga would be totally wrong, because the Visuddhimagga tells you again and again to use these words.
When you practice the earth kasina, so you focus on a disc of earth, and the Visuddhimagga is quite clear.
It says you say to yourself, patavi, patavi, patavi, or buh, buh, whatever the word is for earth, and you say it a hundred times, a thousand times.
The Visuddhimagga is totally clear about the use of a mantra.
When you practice the white kasina, you say white, white, white.
When you practice metta meditation, you say, when you practice, someone has a question about the 32 constituent parts.
How do you practice it?
You say, all through the 32 parts, you actually have a mantra.
And then you pick one.
And you say kesa, kesa, kesa, kesa, focusing on hair, hair, hair, just to visualize it.
The mantra certainly has a power.
Now, we're not creating, this noting is not some new meditation.
It's actually the orthodox form of meditation before the Buddha came around.
And when the Buddha was around, when the Buddha said, When going, he knows I'm going.
It's not he knows the going, it's he knows I am going.
He knows fully and completely I am going.
So there is a clear thought that arises there.
This is not something new.
The Buddha had it, and then you read in the Visuddhimagga, it's explicitly stated that this is what they mean by meditating.
It means to see the object just as it is, to see white as white, to see blue as blue, to see the earth as earth, and so on.
And the mantra is the development there.
So I don't have anything to say about other teachers.
I've heard many teachers decry this sort of practice.
But, you know, this is what we do.
We decry everyone else's practice and tell you, no, no, do ours.
I try not to.
I will tell you, you know, if you like the practice I teach, do it.
If you think that there's a better practice out there, go and practice that other practice.
I'm not going to say anything about...
Not noting or doing this or that going because body scanning techniques or so on unless I have some objective
observation.
Like, for example, I might say that in the Goenka tradition they don't practice walking meditation.
I've heard that actually they do do some walking, but no technical or formal walking meditation, as far as I know.
For that kind of example, I might give, I don't know how Bhante Gunaratana teaches, and I might say, give you some advice about, in regards to what you say, investigating or so on, without notation, simply the sensation.
um well i've explained some of the benefits of noting and i've explained in other videos and if you agree with my explanations or you think that they have some merit then try it and if you find that it helps you then use it if you find that it doesn't help you well i could explain to you why it's not helping you but if you decide it's my explanations are no good then go and practice there are many different teachers and many different ways of approaching
the Buddhist teaching, that may all lead to enlightenment.
I'm not going to say our way is the only way.
I think it's the best, that's why I'm doing it.
Other people obviously disagree.
I met Pantaguna Ratana, and he's really a great, wonderful being, a wonderful person.
So I have not had the chance to have done a course with him, so I'm not sure exactly what he's teaching.
But it must have great benefit.
but I am used to the noting and I know by doing it that it has a great benefit for me so I can just
Repeat what Bhante said.
If you think what other teachers say is good, try it and do it when it is good for you.
And when this noting is good for you, then do that.
When I started meditation, with this kind of meditation, I had done a lot of Zen meditation before that.
And I really had a strong, strong aversion for that noting.
I really disliked it.
And I came to Bhante and said, ah, that is so annoying.
I don't want to do that anymore.
It's like...
noise in my head and he just said well that's how it is that's what is going on in your mind noise in your head and that was kind of convincing and I noticed noticed the noise in my head only because of the noting
without noting I would not have known not probably in a hundred years how much is going on but when I was so stressed because I tried to note everything that is going on inside and outside and that was just so overwhelming
overwhelmingly much.
There was such an abundance that I was so, I am not allowed to say pissed off, but I was so, I don't find another word.
I was so averse with this.
I didn't want to know all this anymore.
I gave the fall to the noting because I did not know better at that time but I was forced I was forced to to go through and continue noting and now I know the benefits of it and I
think that the the most things that are going on in our minds all the thoughts and everything that we give importance are really not important it's there are some important things maybe coming up but what is happening with this noting is that it is
that it is calming down.
Noting becomes a habit and thinking becomes less than.
So you can kind of
by this noting have your mind have a vacation from having to do all this silly useless thinking your your mind really calms down