Meditation as a state of mind
Jeroen
Not all those who wander are lostNetherlands Veteran
I came across a passage in a book which said,
“Deep in you, meditation is already the case. So whenever it happens that your day-to-day turmoil is a little bit less…. Maybe you are watching a sunset, and watching the sunset your constant chattering mind has become quiet, the beauty of the sunset has made it quiet, and then you feel meditation come to the surface”
This struck me as something that was very likely, that in order to connect to meditation we just need to let it surface by encouraging the mind to be quiet. I woke up in the evening last night, and in my mind was the word “Prashant”, which is a common male name in South Asia and means patience, calm, quiet, or tranquil.
To be calmly aware is an excellent state. Often awareness has an element of searching to it, of shifting attention from place to place. These things are good to examine while waiting for quietness of the mind. But meditation as a state of mind implies that we can’t really do it, we aren’t actively making it so, at most we can make conditions favourable for it to arise.
Comments
I woke this morning after a dream about our house being broken into.
AND the emotion/Mind stayed in fear. Much to my surprise. An arising. That was not calmed by meditation but physical exercise.
In Buddhism the Mind includes feeling and sensations. As most of us know.
The experience we have is the Mind. This is what we practice and try to integrate with using tools we have gained.
This is what makes sense to me. It's not so much that we're creating the thing and more that we're creating the causes for its arising.
As a related aside the Tibetan schools have some in depth discussion on this as it divides some of the schools. Look up Rangtong vs Shentong.