Meditation

The Six Paramitas: Dhyana or Meditation

The fifth Paramita is the perfection of meditation or Dhyana Paramita. Basically, meditation is divided into two streams, that of calm abiding or Shamatha, and that of insight or Vipashyana. Insight has to do with the gaining of wisdom and understanding. So I will deal with the first one, Shamatha or calm abiding, and later, I will try to combine wisdom and insight together into one.

We experience everything from the mind. Outwardly and inwardly, we only can know anything through our mind. If our mind is not functioning, we are more or less dead or like a zombie. Everything that we experience and know, we do through our six senses. Our six senses are not only the five usual senses, but include the mind, meaning that all the things which we think are processed through the mind. Yet, how many of us have any idea what the mind is? How many of us experience this mind in itself? We are always looking outwards and even when we talk about the mind, we talk about it from the intellectual point of view. We have all sorts of theories, ideas and psychologies but to experience a thought as a thought, to experience an emotion just as an emotion, to know what is an emotion, how it feels, what is it, who is thinking—we almost never even ask ourselves this. And yet, everything, all our joys, our sorrows, our hopes, our fears, everything which we experience and could possibly experience, we can only experience through the mind.

For example, consider our homes. Many of us are very careful about where we live. We rent, buy or build nice houses which will impress all our neighbours and friends and we decorate them very carefully. We spend a lot of time planning what we are going to put in our residence and how it’s going to be furnished and adorned. We spend a lot of time, a lot of money, we work so hard just so that we can have a nice home, a nice car, and nice clothes. We spend most of our lives maintaining this space for ourselves and we keep it so nice and clean—but we don’t really live in our homes. We don’t live in our houses. We live in our minds—that’s our home. No matter where we go, Australia, Europe, America, Africa, we take our minds with us. We can never leave our minds behind, our minds are our true homes. 

But how much time and effort do we give to cleaning, decorating and adorning the very place where we really live? Think about it. This is where we live and yet day by day by day, we fill it more and more full of junk and garbage through television, movies, books, magazines, media, through conversations, through our thinking. We stuff in more and more garbage and junk and when do we clear this out? We are living in a big trash dump and it doesn’t matter how fancy our outer homes are or how elegant our clothing and how beautiful our hairdo. We are living in a trash can, a garbage bin which we never clean out. We never open the doors and windows to let in fresh air. Then on top of that huge mountain of garbage we want to build a beautiful temple called the spiritual life. Nobody builds a temple on a garbage dump. 

Put it another way, if we were inviting a very honoured guest, say we were inviting His Holiness the Dalai Lama to our home, wouldn’t we clean it first, wouldn’t we try to make everything as beautiful and nice, as acceptable as possible before we say, “Your Holiness, please come in, please sit down”? So, if we are inviting all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas into our hearts, first, we have to have a bit of a house clean. This is where we live. Why don’t we make it sweet-smelling, clear, airy and spacious? So on one hand, this is what meditation is all about. It’s about learning first how to begin to open up the doors and windows of the mind and to begin to slowly sort through and get rid of some of the garbage. 

Usually our minds are very agitated, agitated by the six senses—the eyes, the ears, the nose, the mouth, taste, touch and also the sixth sense which is mind itself with its thoughts, memories, ideas and opinions. All these churn up the mind continually and because our mind is in a state of turmoil through being agitated by thoughts, ideas and impressions coming from the outside, we do not see things clearly, we do not reflect the external environment as it really is. We only get our version distorted by our judgements, our thoughts, our opinions and ideas and all this stuff going on inside. So it’s not really what is happening but our rendition of what is happening which we are always interpreting for ourselves. So when we try to look into the mind itself, it is so churned up that we cannot yet look beyond the surface thoughts, the surface chatter. 

Through Shamatha meditation the mind begins to quiet down and the outer senses are no longer so operative while the inner sixth sense, the mind itself, has become very tranquil, calm and one-pointed. Then that is a clear mind and it sees very accurately because then the mind just sees what’s happening and there is no longer interpreting. At the same time we are able to use that calm one-pointed mind to look in on itself and to see through increasingly subtle layers of the psyche. Therefore, this first attaining to a state of calm, single-pointedness is really quite important. One Lama said to me that if we have a good Shamatha practice, then all the Dharma is in the palm of our hands. Normally, whatever practices we are doing, if we do them with a distracted mind, then it’s not going to work. The books say that even if we say a mantra for a 100 aeons of time with a distracted mind, we would not accomplish the goal. But if we say even a few mantras with a mind which is really concentrated and merged in the practice, then the results will come very quickly. Therefore it’s worthwhile to train our mind as much as we can in becoming  quiet, focused and calm. However, this is only stage number one, it’s not the end. 

When the Buddha left his palace to seek answers to the problems of suffering and the causes of suffering, he first studied under two yogis. Now these yogis were teaching a kind of Shamatha practice. Traditionally in Shamatha practice, there are many levels of which four of them are fine material levels, and the higher ones are called formless or immaterial levels. In these formless levels, there is no thinking as such. There is infinity of space, infinity of consciousness, neither perception or non-perception and nothing whatsoever. It’s a very refined state of mind and it’s the ultimate state of nothingness—there is neither consciousness nor no consciousness. At that time this was regarded as liberation. The Buddha accomplished this state very soon, but he said that that was not liberation, that was still within the realm of birth and death and had not yet gone beyond birth and death. So he left those yogis and wandered forth and went on further. 

So why is this not liberation? This kind of meditation, although very important as a preparation, if indulged in too much could be counter productive. What can happen is that the state of bliss can act as a shield which hides one’s negative emotions, one’s delusions, one’s greed, lust, anger and ill-will which are still lying latent and have not been dealt with. Sometimes practitioners enter into blissful states and think they are liberated—they are so blissed out and everything is so clear. This is very dangerous because it deludes us into thinking that we are much more spiritual than we are and that all our negative emotions have been eradicated. We can imagine that we no longer have any negative emotions because we are in this state of bliss and clarity where everything is one and it’s all very wonderful. We look and we can’t see anything negative there because it’s been covered up, but the defilements are all there growing underneath and if the opportunity arises, they erupt, often very powerfully and uncontrollably. 

These negative emotions are intensified because the mind has become so powerful now that although these delusions are usually covered over, when they erupt, they are that much more dangerous than they could ever be in an ordinary untrained mind. There are many contemporary examples of this amongst certain gurus which are very troubling but these situations are usually concealed by their disciples of course. We can get into this state where all seems absolutely perfect but actually the deeply rooted problem has never been resolved. So when it comes back again, it is all the more difficult to control.  

There is also the problem of remaining in and being attached to the state of calmness, being attached to the experience of inner bliss. We can get attached to anything, and this is ultimately an obstacle. However as the first step, it is very important to develop this quality of getting the mind calmed down and one-pointed. There are many ways of doing this. It is important when we start to meditate that this is not regarded as a kind of endurance test. If we look at the mind, our minds are very wild and unguarded. The Buddha compared the mind to a wild elephant. Now wild elephants are not like the kind of elephants we see in the zoos or in circuses. Wild elephants are usually placid but when they go on a rampage, they destroy everything. They uproot trees, they crash through the jungle, they are completely uncontrollable and very dangerous. They do an enormous amount of damage. So the Buddha compared our mind to a wild elephant and not just a wild elephant but an elephant in a rut. Sometimes, he also compared the mind to a monkey, always jumping around, never still. If you look at monkeys in the wild, you will see that they spend all their time jumping around, fighting each other, copulating and generally trying to think how to get into mischief. That’s our mind.

Think of the mind like a wild horse—there are basically two ways to deal with the problem of taming a wild horse. Either we can catch it and beat it into submission, we can force it to eventually carry out our own will by goading it, restricting it or by beating it. Eventually the horse will break down and it will become docile. But what we have then is a broken hack which is sad and resentful. Sometimes in India we can see horses pulling carriages and we know that’s the way they are treated. They are very unhappy, dejected animals who try whatever they can to get away from their labours but they get beaten back into submission again.

Or we can try to tame our horse through more gentle means, by gently and slowly enticing the horse, very gradually trying to win the horse’s goodwill, to quiet the horse’s fear, to let him know that nothing bad will happen and very patiently win him over until eventually he begins to quiet down and to trust and eventually becomes docile and willing from his side to do what we want and be able to please. 

Likewise there are two approaches to taming the mind. One is that we really force the mind through long sitting sessions, not moving for a moment and coercing the mind into being concentrated. And that can work. Either we get a mind which maybe never wants to meditate again or our mind feels so triumphant from having been able to sit and concentrate for hours and hours on end unmoving that it is willing to go on. 

But here, I think it is more skilful the way my teacher taught, which is to win the cooperation of the mind. If we are watching an interesting movie or television programme, or if we are reading a fascinating book, nobody has to coerce us into concentrating. We are there, we are absorbed, we are merged with it, the hours go by and we haven’t even noticed. Our mind is very one-pointed. We can’t put it down. We sit up through the night. So we all have the capacity to be one-pointed and absorbed, concentrated on one stream of events. Our challenge is to bring that kind of interest and absorption into something which is not initially absolutely fascinating like observing the in-going and out-going of the breath, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day, year after year. 

Therefore, if one has never practised much before, it is a good idea to start with short sessions. This is because when we actually start meditating, if we begin to get more concentrated and calm then that’s fine. If we stop just when we are still enjoying the practice and we could still go a little bit more, then our minds remember that “that was fun” and we are willing to try again. If we push too far, then the mind becomes tired and we lose our concentration. If we keep pushing, the next time when we sit, the mind will remember that it felt tired and bored and there will be a sense of aversion in the mind thinking about that. We are not trying to make a battle with the mind. This is not a matter of subjugation, of beating down the mind until it finally obeys. It is a matter of encouraging the mind to cooperate and to realise that there is genuine happiness in calm and in being more one-pointed and clear. The initial difficulties are the inner distractions which we experience, which are really no problem as they can be utilised as part of the process. 

People imagine that when they sit down to meditate, they should immediately be able to access deep levels of silence, calm and one-pointedness, but when they sit down and discover that they seem to have more thoughts than normal, they become very discouraged. Everybody more or less experiences the same problems. I am sure even the Lord Buddha himself never just sat down and immediately had no thoughts. If that had been so, he could never have taught meditation because he wouldn’t have known the problems. But he talked so much about the problems of meditation that it seems he must have experienced them, otherwise how would he know? Everyone has problems, everyone has difficulties and those who are finally accomplished are those who persevere. But sometimes, if we feel we can’t do it, it helps to keep the sessions not too long. We practise, we rest the mind and then we start again, rest the mind and start again and gradually, the mind begins to acclimatise. It’s like physical exercises. If we want to do yoga or aerobics and we start off by doing a two-hour session and we have never exercised before, then what’s going to happen is that we either collapse during the session or the next day we are not able to move. Of course we can’t move because everything aches! We think, “Oh yoga, don’t even mention that.” We don’t want to try again. But if we do a short session and stretch as far as we can but not too far, then we think, “That’s not too bad, let’s try again.” Then we carry on and the session gets longer and longer and before we know it, those exercises that the other more advanced yoga students were doing and which seemed so impossible… suddenly we can do them too.

Why should it not be the same with the mind? It is totally untrained and untamed like a wild horse. So of course at the beginning there are going to be problems, there is going to be resistance. So we are skilful. We very gradually begin to shorten the rope, hold out the sugar. We need to reassure the mind: “This is genuine refuge for the mind. This is a wonderful thing if we can just become even a little bit calm, more quiet, more centred, more focused and more one-pointed. Oh mind, you will be so happy! This is where your happiness lies, this is the way.” But we have to keep going on and on. At some sessions the mind begins to cooperate, everything is much easier and nice and calm. Now we’ve got it and then next session the thoughts are completely all over the place. But it’s all right, there is no problem. If the mind wants to be wild and distracted, just be wild and distracted, but slowly pull it back—that’s the way to go. 

Of course the mind has thoughts; it’s the nature of the mind to have thoughts. If we think of the mind as an ocean, then the surface of the ocean has waves. No problem. If we think of the mind like the sky, then the sky has clouds. So don’t worry about the thoughts. Let them go, just don’t give them any energy. Apart from the fact that the mind has thoughts, there are basically two problems which we encounter when we are practising. The first one is called drowsiness or sinking. This means when we sit, we begin to feel very sleepy—that’s gross drowsiness.

So some people when they start to meditate, they get into a drowsy state. This is very common. Milarepa, the great 11th century Tibetan yogi, when he started used to meditate with a lighted butterlamp on his head. So he obviously had his problems too. So a friend of mine used a small bowl filled to the brim with water on her head. This is a way just to keep us from not nodding off. In this way, we have to be inventive and not give in to drowsiness, not start a habit pattern. 

But the subtle sinking is more dangerous because it’s less obvious. We can get into a state which is calm and very peaceful, but where there is little awareness and we can sit like that for hours. A genuine meditative mind is very relaxed and spacious but totally alert, very bright and clear. So if we are in a state where we are very calm and spacious but there isn’t that vivid clarity or alert awareness, then we are sinking. This is dangerous as one can stay in that state for a long time and think that one is now going into deep meditation. But this is not meditation. It’s just a subtle state of sinking and afterwards when we come out of meditation, we kind of drift and float around, everything is beautiful and peaceful—the bliss cloud syndrome. Then we are seriously going astray because we should come out from our meditation feeling quite centred but also very present, aware and awake. This is the process of waking up and not putting ourselves to sleep.

The other main problem of course is our old companion, distraction. If the mind is over-acting and very distracted, the antidote to that is to be in a slightly warmer room, to wear heavier clothing, to eat more food and in general to get more grounded. Sometimes, we visualise a dark spot just below the navel to bring the mind down. Sometimes, it is said also that we should think of the sufferings of samsara and the fact of impermanence and death and that we don’t have time to waste, so that we can sit with a sense of urgency. Since we have wasted so much time already, this is not the time to carry on wasting more. This is the time for meditating. It is the time to be serious and to put all our efforts into doing this practice. We must not just dissipate our energies again by thinking many thoughts, getting very agitated, wanting to get up and go somewhere else. We have to be very strong with ourselves, very firm and clear about what we are going to do. 

It’s very simple and maybe we should keep our practice very simple, especially at the beginning. The important thing we have to do is just to bring the quality of knowing, of attention onto the breath. Breathing in, breathing out—just to know it, not to change the breath in any way or to comment on it or to think about it and analyse it, but just to know it and experience the breath in the moment as much as possible without any mental comment. As soon as we are commenting mentally, we are not with the breath, we are just thinking about it again. All the thoughts that come into the mind are traditionally said to be like unwanted guests. They are waiting to be asked to sit down but nobody asks them to do so. Certainly, we don’t offer them tea or ask them how they are. We ignore them as if they are just not there. If we ignore our unwanted guests, eventually, they will get kind of embarrassed and then after a while they leave.

It’s the same with our thoughts which are the waves on the ocean of the mind. We don’t give them energy. We don’t give them any attention. We don’t think about our thoughts. We don’t follow our thoughts, we ignore them and we are not troubled by them. Our attention is only on the breathing in and the breathing out—that’s all we have to do. If our mind strays and we get caught up again in thoughts, we just let them go and come back to the breathing. So if we spend the whole time being with the breathing, getting lost, bringing the mind back, going off again and bringing the mind back again, that’s fine, no problem. Slowly, slowly we begin to become more often with the breathing. Our breathing tends to stand out more and become more clear, more vivid, while other things kind of recede into the background. 

At the beginning there is all kinds of junk inside and so there seems to be no space, but after awhile, if we really very patient and try to bring the attention back again and again eventually the thoughts and sounds recede into the background where they are just distant rumbles. Eventually, of course, they will begin to quiet down of themselves but this won’t happen immediately. The real qualities needed for the spiritual life are patience and perseverance.

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May All Beings Benefit
Sarva Mangalam