Lama Shenpen on the relationship between calm and insight

Jeffrey

Summary: Lama Shenpen explains the relationship between Shamatha (calm abiding) and Vipashyana (awareness/insight) aspects of meditation.

A student writes:

"For some time I feel that I am daydreaming for most of my sessions meditating.
I have read that some people start with the breath as a preliminary to formless meditation. So I want to start with the breath. Then go to the overall state of feeling. And then go to opening to space.

I wondered if you would have questions or remarks regarding my plan."

Lama Shenpen:

You do need a basic level of Shamatha in order to move into Vipashyana.

Vipashyana is what eventually leads to liberation - Vipashyana taken to a deep enough level.

I do advise students to start with focusing on the breath. For some people it may be better to start by counting both the in and the out breaths to start with until there is enough subtlety to be able to be more spacious about the whole thing and just use the out breath to ‘come back’ and to suggest a direction towards spaciousness and letting go.

In the Introduction to Meditation booklet I also suggest starting with becoming more aware of your body and how it is feeling - this is both grounding and calming. It also helps us to not go up into our heads where we tend to think thoughts are.

So yes - what you suggest sounds like it might be a good idea.

However, once we are spacious enough and can notice daydreaming is in fact thought, every time we catch ourselves daydreaming we have the opportunity to recognise it as thought and to wonder what thought itself is.

It can be quite startling to realise we don’t really know what it is. We kind of take it for granted because it is there all the time. We kind of know it but then again – do we?

Whatever you say about it is never quite what it is. You could become really interested in the very capacity to think and to dream - and not to think immediately “Oh, I am failing at meditation”.

Instead you could think “Wow – how is daydreaming happening? What am I really experiencing when I daydream?”

We get lost in the content of the dream without noticing it is a less than fleeting experience. I say less than fleeting because “fleeting” would mean it came from somewhere, stayed and went somewhere - but actually I never experience it before it arrives and when it arrives it’s already gone.

This doesn't make sense but it’s a challenge every moment. If it doesn't make sense then how would it make sense?

It defeats the thinking mind trying to make sense of what thoughts are. The mind becomes focused and more integrated naturally if we focus on what thoughts are rather than trying to stop or still them.

That is how Vipashyana intensifies Shamatha.

But it is true that one needs a certain amount of Shamatha to start with - enough to be able to focus one’s attention for long enough to become interested in what the mind and thoughts are.

I hope this helps

Lama Shenpen Hookham.