A short review: You are not your thoughts. (Or feelings, impulses, sensations, etc.) You are a combination of those things. But to understand that requires careful and patient observation of the PROCESS of being who you think you are. So to get there you need a little background, some exercises to practice and see for yourself, and lots of patience to do this regularly. The exercise of the bell is to demonstrate that there is a "sense", a function of you which is called "thinking" and it´s purpose is to develop a narrative (a false one, actually, but that´s later) made up of "thoughts". Each thought is a unit of information, containing many facets. We can analogize this to the flow of cars seen from a freeway overpass - there is a flow, a movement of thoughts, and each one unravels its contents the more you focus on them. So far, so good? Your thoughts come in waves, in a stream of constant motion and you have the ability to either identify with each thought, or the narrative of collected thoughts, or, you can spend some time watching the entire process in order to experientially understand what..."who"...you really are. Buddhist meditation is made up of 2 parts, two "wings" necessary to fly: calming (shamatha) and insight (vipassana/vipashyana). These 2 are also called "stopping" and "seeing" to give you a sense of what must be developed and how. "Stopping" or calming is necessary because when you are "scatterbrained" or too busily engaged in things, you cannot observe the process--you are too involved in the process to do that. First you must calm down. It is good for all of us that the very effort to "calm" down has the noticeable effect of calming us down! That is, when you take a seat, in a comfortable posture with the back straight, but not stiff and you attend to the breath, for example, as your "anchor", your respiration drops, your blood pressure drops, and you begin to feel more peaceful. Calming meditation like this is a part of many spiritual traditions, not just Buddhism. But "seeing" or "insight" meditation, the tradition of "vipassana" can be said to be the unique contribution to the field of meditation offered by the Buddha. To gain insight, to "see" means to experientially understand that what the Buddha called "The Three Marks of Existence" permeates everything. Everything inside you and everything outside you. Everything. These "3 Marks" are: 1. Dukkha - dis-ease, unsatisfactoriness, "suffering", 2. Anatta -lit. "without atta/atman, or soul, i.e., there is no permanent entity, no permanent substratum of identity we can call "self", 3. Anicca - impermanence The gaining if insight which leads to liberation is this: by calming down we can train ourselves to "see" into the Ultimate nature of all phenomena, within us or around us, and experientially apprehend this as without stable happiness, completely impermanent, and without a constant, identifiable single self. These Truths are NOT meant to comfort your ego, to get you "bliss", or to reassure you that "everything will be fine." They are a challenge to almost everything we regard as self and the world. And yet the Buddha was seen as incomprehensibly kind, compassionate, and wise, and totally "awake" (which is, after all, what the word "Buddha" means). The end result doesn´t seem so bad, does it? But first, you have to gain that insight...and THAT is the hard part. So, next week, I´ll begin some practical instructions. Reflect upon this until then!
Posted on: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 10:08:03 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015