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Meditators develop valuable insights into their personality, behaviors, and relationships, making it easier to recognize and change past conditioning and counterproductive views that make life difficult. They have a greater awareness and sensitivity to others,
Direct knowledge of the true nature of reality and the permanent liberation from suffering describes the only genuinely satisfactory goal of the spiritual path. A mind with this type of Insight experiences life, and death, as a great adventure, with the clear purpose of manifesting love and compassion toward all beings.
Whether we’re awake or dreaming, this stream consists of sensations, thoughts, emotions, and the choices we make in response to them. That is our personal reality. The art and science of meditation helps us live a more fulfilling life, because it gives us the tools we need to examine and work with our conscious experience.
When our speech and action comes from a place of wisdom and compassion, they will always produce better results than when driven by greed and anger.
Ānāpānasati Sutta.
Indian monk Asanga
Kamalaśīlā,
While the structure of this presentation comes directly from traditional teachings, Asanga in particular, the meditation instructions that flesh it out do not.
śamatha9 (tranquility or calm abiding), vipassanā10 (Insight), samādhi (concentration or stable attention), and sati (mindfulness).
Śamatha has five characteristics: effortlessly stable attention (samādhi),13 powerful mindfulness (sati), joy, tranquility, and equanimity.14
Insights called vipassanā are not intellectual. Rather, they are experientially based, deeply intuitive realizations that transcend, and ultimately shatter, our commonly held beliefs and understandings. The five most important of these are Insights into impermanence, emptiness, the nature of suffering, the causal interdependence of all phenomena, and the illusion of the separate self (i.e., “no-Self”).16
Mastery of one Stage is a requirement for the mastery of the next, and none can be skipped.
Seeing the sun
Losing your job, the death of a spouse, or a health problem can set even an advanced meditator back to the earliest Stages. In fact, almost anything that happens outside of meditation can potentially have this effect. This just serves as another reminder that meditative accomplishments, like everything else, depend on certain conditions, and can therefore be influenced by worldly events.
Consciously cultivating mindfulness and awareness in quotidian and momentary action will lead to habitual transformative transcendence.
not getting ahead of yourself. Be systematic and practice at the appropriate level.
In reality, all we’re “doing” in meditation is forming and holding specific conscious intention—nothing more.
Setting and holding the right intentions is what’s essential. If your intention is strong, the appropriate responses will occur, and the practice will unfold in a very natural and predictable way. Once again, repeatedly sustained intentions lead to repeated mental actions, which become mental habits—the habits of mind that lead to joy, equanimity, and Insight.
Willpower can’t prevent the mind from forgetting the breath. Nor can you force yourself to become aware that the mind is wandering. Instead, just hold the intention to appreciate the “aha” moment that recognizes mind-wandering,
intention to invoke introspective attention frequently,
Set and hold the intention to be vigilant
let it come, let it be, let it go.
Worldly Desire, Aversion, Laziness and Lethargy, Agitation Due to Worry and Remorse, and Doubt.
You will also come to realize that these hindrances are the basis for the stories or melodramas the mind concocts. Examples of stories rooted in Worldly Desire include: “I need” a beautiful house, and “I want” a successful career so I can be happy. Examples of stories rooted in Aversion include: “I hate” rude people; “It’s not fair” that they always get what they want; “I don’t want” to be sick today; or “I can’t take” this place anymore. Examples of stories arising from Laziness and Lethargy include: “I’m too tired” to help you right now, and “It’s too late,” or “a waste of time” to try to
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“I’m ashamed” of behaving that way; and “I’m afraid.” There are also self-defeating stories steeped in Doubt, such as: “I can’t” meditate; “I’m too” clumsy to play; and “I’m not” good enough, smart enough, fast enough, and so on.
outcomes; the kind of uncertainty that makes us hesitate and keeps us from making the effort needed to validate something through our own experience.
That said, meditation doesn’t involve repressing worldly desires. It gives us direct, experiential Insight into the many ways that desire leads to pain and anxiety.
Look for the joy means notice the pleasant aspects of the practice in every moment. Negative thoughts and feelings are inevitable, but you don’t need to get caught up in them and let them color your practice. Even when you have pain somewhere, there will always be a pleasant feeling elsewhere. Likewise, feelings of peace, satisfaction, and happiness are often present. Hold them in awareness so they become a regular part of your conscious experience.
You could say labeling teaches introspective awareness to recognize the “faces of your abductors”—those dangerous distractions that steal your attention and cause you to forget.
The reprogramming that occurs in meditation also transforms the way we think, feel, and act in more radical and broadly effective ways. That’s because the unconscious conditioning that emerges is of a more fundamental nature, driving a wide range of reactive behaviors that would otherwise require many different triggering events.
Conditioning of such a fundamental nature usually remains deeply hidden, but can surface in the stillness of meditation. Therefore, the application of mindfulness in meditation can rapidly accomplish much more than ever could be by the piecemeal process of confronting conditioning in daily life.
Stilling the mind does not mean getting rid of thoughts and blocking out all distractions. It means reducing the constant movement of attention.
When confronting emotions, always start by investigating the physical sensations that accompany them. As with pain, this is the most effective way of staying objective. Every emotion has its own characteristic sensations and related bodily movements. Scan your own body to discover these for yourself. What are the specific bodily sensations that go with this particular emotion? Where are they located? Are they pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral? Are they changing intensity? Are they expanding and contracting, or solid and fixed? Do they change in quality or stay the same?
Only when you’re ready, turn your attention from the physical to the mental aspects of the emotion. Without getting caught up in your subjective experience, try to find a label that accurately describes the emotion (e.g., anxiety, guilt, lust) and quality (e.g., intense, vague, agitating).
Notice what kinds of thoughts the emotion triggers. Is the emotion getting more or less intense, or staying fairly constant? Perhaps the emotion is transforming. For example, anxiety can morph ...
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Joseph Goldstein says, “It’s not what we are feeling that’s important, but how we relate to it that matters.”
Dullness of any kind is always pleasant, except when we actively resist.
The best way to detect subtle dullness is by making introspective awareness stronger. The key to doing that is intention. In Stages Two and Three, you intentionally emphasized continuous extrospective awareness. Now, you must strengthen your introspective awareness. Hold the intention to remain continuously aware of what’s happening in the mind, moment by moment.
Be aware not only of the contents of your mind—thoughts, feelings, underlying intentions, and so forth—but also of the activities of your mind. At the same time, keep cultivating the intention to observe the meditation object continuously with as much intensity and clarity as possible.
holding the intention to maintain bright peripheral awareness while observing the meditation object as clearly and vividly as you did in your best meditations.
hedonic feeling13
holding a clear intention to continuously observe the state and activities of your mind, while still maintaining exclusive attention.
you must first clearly define and stabilize your scope of attention. Then, you completely ignore everything outside that scope.
At the same time, remember to exclude nothing from peripheral awareness.
Simply hold the intention to observe all the fine details of the meditation object. At the same time, hold the intention to ignore everything else.
For example, at some point you may suddenly realize you no longer know whether the sensations you’re currently observing correspond to the in- or the out-breath. You also realize that you could know in an instant, but would have to intentionally shift attention away from the sensations to the conceptual formations of the mind. Other times, you may suddenly realize that the place where the sensations seem to occur no longer corresponds to where your nose is. The breath seems way off to the side, or above or below where it should be.
Awakening is an accident, but meditating on the mind is a practice that will make you accident-prone.
Think about walking as “staying in the pleasant moment.”
