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Vipassana can be translated as “insight,” a clear awareness of exactly what is happening as it happens. Samatha can be translated as “concentration” or “tranquillity,” and is a state in which the mind is focused only on one item, brought to rest, and not allowed to wander.
The essence of our experience is change. Change is incessant.
But human culture has taught us some odd responses to this endless flowing.
“grasping.”
“rejecting.”
“ignoring.”
The direct result of all this lunacy is a perpetual treadmill race to nowhere, endlessly pounding after pleasure, endlessly fleeing from pain, and endlessly ignoring 90 percent of our experience.
You can’t make radical changes in the pattern of your life until you begin to see yourself exactly as you are now.
“What you are now is the result of what you were. What you will be tomorrow will be the result of what you are now.
Meditation changes your character by a process of sensitization, by making you deeply aware of your own thoughts, words, and deeds.
We are going to teach you to watch the functioning of your own mind in a calm and detached manner so you can gain insight into your own behavior.
Learning to look at each second as if it were the first and only second in the universe is essential in vipassana meditation.
Meditation teaches you how to disentangle yourself from the thought process. It is the mental art of stepping out of your own way, and that’s a pretty useful skill in everyday life.
Patience is the key. Patience. If you learn nothing else from meditation, you will learn patience. Patience is essential for any profound change.
9) View all problems as challenges. Look upon negativities that arise as opportunities to learn and to grow.
Differences do exist between people, but dwelling upon them is a dangerous process. Unless carefully handled, this leads directly to egotism. Ordinary human thinking is full of greed, jealousy, and pride. A man seeing another man on the street may immediately think, “He is better looking than I am.” The instant result
is envy or shame. A girl seeing another girl may think, “I am prettier than she is.” The instant result is pride. This sort of comparison is a mental habit, and it leads directly to ill feeling of one sort or another: greed, envy, pride, jealousy, or hatred. It is an unskillful mental state, but we do it all the time. We compare our looks with others, our success, accomplishments, wealth, possessions, or IQ, and all of this leads to the same state—estrangement, barriers between people, and ill feeling.
Rather than noticing the differences between oneself and others, the meditator trains him- or herself to notice the similarities. She centers her attention on those factors that are universal to all life, things that will move her closer to others. Then her comparisons, if any, lead to feelings of kinship rather than of estrangement.
Differences do exist. It means simply that we de-emphasize contrasts and emphasize the universal factors that we have in common.
