Insights

music

While meditating, thoughts often come up. There are many varieties - if certain thoughts repeat themselves, we must assume there are unresolved issues, perhaps even unfinished business from a previous life. Stray thoughts, on the other hand, can be ignored. They have no power.

Then there are thoughts which reflect certain powerful emotions, so much so that they could even produce physical reactions like heavy breathing, coughing, etc. Overcoming this is not easy for two reasons - first off, instincts play a role here, so it is very hard to overcome something fundamental to our evolutionary struggle. Second, owing to repetition they have become strong and almost second nature to us. That's why we perform certain actions without even thinking. It has become habitual, so going against it takes effort.

This is what I have learnt while meditating. Now it is your turn. Share your insights.

person

To build off what you have said, meditation can act as both a way to gain an ability to pause before acting upon our habitual behavior and as a training method to habituate ourselves with more beneficial habits (ie metta).

nenkohai

Habits die hard. But they do die.

how

@Music..an interesting moniker for this thread.

Meditation is just the effort to not fiddle around with arising phenomena. While your description of your experience of meditation is understandable, approaching the phenomena that arises as something to overcome is really just more fiddling of that phenomena.
This is the same for stray thoughts that one ignores or the contemplation of them as possibly unresolved.

Our ego/ identity/ habit patterns & it's conditioned support structure are just us playing our Skandhas like a personal orchestra.. I believe that the efficacy of meditation is not playing a different song, no matter how spiritual we might reason it to be, but is just how willing we are to withdraw from the conducting of it.

With respect.

person

how said:

I believe that the efficacy of meditation is not playing a different song, no matter how spiritual we might reason it to be, but is just how willing we are to withdraw from the conducting of it.

This is probably just a difference in tradition (you're zen right?) In TB using meditation and reflection to develop, what are ultimately relative and not ultimate, more positive qualities conducive to happiness and flourishing is a very central component. The Mahamudra and Dzogchen schools are a little bit more similar to the Zen approach though.

Silouan

The arising of thoughts is simply beyond our conscious control as they are produced by the primordial unconscious nature of the mind, not to be confused with the state of loss of consciousness, but we do have conscious methods or techniques of how to experience them.

In the dream state the unconscious mind can produce all sorts of vivid events, happenings, and thoughts for us to experience. These new experiences are not necessarily fragments of past memories, events, or experiences but to some extent can be influenced by them.

Sabre

Thoughts arise because of attachment to thinking. If this attachment is lessened, we can think when we want to think and can stop thoughts when we don't want to think.

how

person said:

how said:

I believe that the efficacy of meditation is not playing a different song, no matter how spiritual we might reason it to be, but is just how willing we are to withdraw from the conducting of it.

This is probably just a difference in tradition (you're zen right?) In TB using meditation and reflection to develop, what are ultimately relative and not ultimate, more positive qualities conducive to happiness and flourishing is a very central component. The Mahamudra and Dzogchen schools are a little bit more similar to the Zen approach though.

Good point
@music was strickly speaking of meditation and so that was what I was addressing
where as you are bringing a Boddhisattvic flavour to it all. ..
I actually hail from a contemplative arm of Zen and so have no qualms about the value of reflection but in reference to your post, see happiness as a transient phenomena that is no more helpful on the path to sufferings cessation than it's absence.
Yup the DL would be laughin at me at this point.

I sometimes think the difference in view is simply where on the path one rests ones gaze.

Jeffrey

Where does an insight go? How can they come and go if they are insights? If it is a truth why does it come and go?

My answer is that
'that which is seen' is impermanent... but the vision capability itself is bodhi, awake.

ThailandTom

I have learnt how insanely fast my mind operates, and it does so on autopilot. Only when we observe can we switch to manual. I have also learnt that meditation is hard and requires a lot of effort.