Rose,
All teachers and Eastern traditions, and now Western
psychologists/pychotherapitsts are essentially saying the same things
about meditation:
o Two of the principal causes of human suffering are a strong desire and
grasping for what we like and a strong aversion to, fear of, hate for,
criticim of and emoting over what we don't like.
o These two passions can roil, stress and debilitate the mind on an
ongoing basis.
o The objective of meditation is to deprogram the mind from this
habitual, stressful push/pull activity.
o Meditation addresses this problem in a mini-timeslice of formal
meditation as follows:
o In meditation, one's mind is regarded as the open, clear, sky.
Thoughts, feelings, sensations, and perceptions are like clouds floating
by in this clear blue sky.
o One watches the clouds float by without comment, without judgment,
without reactivity and without grasping at or pushing away.
o (In meditation, one keeps a still body in order to minimize cloud
formation.)
o Gradually, after much practice, the frequency of cloud appearance will
decline.
o Eventually, one will have little difficulty entering the clear-sky
state in meditation.
o It is advisable not to engage in mind-disturbing activities when out
of the formal meditation state as that would tend to dissipate the
clear-sky state.
o Eventually the open, clear-mind state, with minimal to no
grasping/aversion will begin to extend itself to the
between-formal-meditation periods.
o Eventually one becomes the seamless buddha-mind of "just here and
now."
o (And, behind the scenes, beyond one's awareness, all this effort is
being recorded in neural changes.)
--ED
--- In [email protected], Rose P <things_r...@...> wrote:
>
This was a really interesting article Ed. The bit that really stood out
for me was 'Years of meditation cultivates a natural non-reactivity to
experience.' It made me wonder whether, once everything else is stripped
away (the words, the concepts, the debates, and indeed the
'wondering'...), is non-reactivity to experience the essence, the key,
the aim of the practice.... Rose
