The Mahasiddha Tilopa’s six essential points of meditation contain the basic principles of placement meditation. 1. The first point is not to be distracted by, dwell upon, get involved in, get lost in, nourish, encourage, or follow thoughts about the past. Anything that arises concerning anything that occurred or one thought prior to the current moment, one should simply let go of it. Ultimately,one should develop the discipline or the automatic habit of letting go of such thoughts instantly, on the spot, and one should learn to remain in such a state of .permanent let-go.. 2. The second point is not to be distracted by, dwell upon, get involved in, get lost in, nourish, encourage, get fixated on, or follow thoughts about the present. In particular, one should not fixate on either outer phenomena or inner experiences. 3. The third point is not to be distracted by, dwell upon, get involved in, get lost in, nourish, encourage, or speculate about the future or thoughts of the future,
but to let go of them instantly as well. 4. The fourth point is not to meditate. One should resist, or let go of the temptation, which at some point always arises in the experience of beginning meditators, to improve or make better one’s meditation by meditating on tranquility, or on the experience of openness or on clarity or on bliss or by fabricating or contriving any strategy to improve one’s meditation. All such attempts to improve one’s meditation by meditating are cul-de- sacs, and, as such, obstacles to meditation. 5. The fifth point is not to analyze. Although there are other forms of meditation that teach one to analyze one’s experience, the ultimate goal of such analysis is to transcend analytical and conceptual impositions upon one’s experience altogether, so that one will finally experience directly the true nature of mind, the true nature of experience, the true nature of reality. So in this approach, according to the fifth point, one should not analyze; one should not engage in the asking of such questions as … What is its nature? Where does it really reside? How does appear here? Why is it at all? Does it exist outside or inside the mind? What are its other characteristics?. One should let go of all tendencies to analyze one’s experience. So, then, if one is not to be distracted by thoughts of past, present, or future; and if one is not to meditate and not to analyze,then what should one be doing? What is one’s mind to hang on to? The answer is “nothing”. Tilopa's sixth point is just to “leave it to itself”. Whatever arises in the mind, one should neither welcome nor reject, neither encourage nor suppress, nor should one get lost in thoughts. In the words of Bokar Rinpoche there is “nothing to do”; nothing to do beyond resting in the awareness of the freshness of whatever arises. The style of breathing meditation that many of us in the Kagyu and Nyingma schools of Tibetan Buddhism begin with combines shamatha with the placement meditation style of vipashyana. When we are going out with the out-breath, which involves the sense of uniting mind and breath, and mind and breath with space, we are practicing shamatha. When we abandon this discipline at the end of the out-breath and simply rest in the space between the end of the out-breath and the beginning of the next out-breath, without any particular attention to the in-breath, we are practicing placement meditation. If, in our practice of this discipline, we find our experience during the “gap” has the quality of Tilopa’s six points of meditation, then it is no longer necessary to make a point of following the breath. It can drop away just as a leaf drops off of a tree. However, if any form of mental dullness is not dissolved co-emergently as it arises, or if one becomes distracted by or lost in thoughts, one should return to one’s shamatha discipline of following the breath. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <fairfieldlife@yahoogroups.com> wrote: Should TM'er Buddhists even be allowed to have a Dome badge? Is it possible to be a buddhist and practice meditation effortlessly? -Buck
