Buddhist Writings

Encouragement to Meditation

Gill Washington Ajahn Sumedho, Buddhist Writings, Meditation, Spirituality , , , , 0 Comment

Excerpted from  Intuitive Awareness

By Ajahn Sumedho

Then there is this encouragement to what we call ‘meditation’. This word ‘meditation’ can mean all kinds of things. It’s a word that includes any kind of mental practices, good or bad. But when I use this word, what I’m mainly using it for is that sense of centring, that sense of establishing, resting in the centre. The only way that one can really do that is not to try and think about it and analyse it; you have to trust in just a simple act of attention, of awareness. It’s so simple and so direct that our complicated minds get very confused.

“What’s he talking about? I’ve never seen any still point. I’ve never found a still point in me. When I sit and meditate, there’s nothing still about it.” But there’s an awareness of that. Even if you think you’ve never had a still point or you’re a confused, messed-up character that really can’t meditate, trust in the awareness of that very perception. That’s why I encourage, whatever you think you are, to think it deliberately; really explore the kind of perceptions you have of yourself, so that they’re not just habitually going through your mind and you’re either believing them or trying to get rid of them. The more we try to get rid of personalities, the more confused we get. If you assume that you’ve got to get rid of your personality in some way because it’s an illusion, then you’re caught in another illusion, that “I’m someone that has a personality that I’ve got to get rid of; I’m the personality that’s got to get rid of my personality.” It doesn’t get anywhere – ridiculous. It’s not a matter of getting rid of, but of knowing.

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Taking Personal Responsibility

Gill Washington Ajahn Sumedho, Buddhist Writings, Joy, Life, Mindfulness, Spirituality , , , , 0 Comment

Excerpted from The Mind and the Way

By Ajahn Sumedho

With mindfulness, we can be independent of the positions other people are taking. We can stand on our own two feet and take responsibility for acting in a virtuous way, regardless of what the rest of sociery is doing.I can be kind, generous, and loving toward you, and that is a joy to me.But if I make my happiness dependent upon your being kind to me, then it will always be threatened, because if you aren’t doing what I like-behaving the way I want you to-then I’m going to be unhappy. So then, my happiness is always under threat because the world might not behave as I want it to.

It’s clear that I would spend the rest of my life being terribly disappointed if I expected everything to change-if I expected everybody to become virtuous, wars to stop, money not to be wasted, governments to be compassionate, sharing, and giving-everything to be just exactly the way I want it! Actually, I don’t expect to see very much of that in my lifetime, but there is no point in being miserable about it ; happiness based on what I want is not all that important.

Joy isn’t dependent on getting things, or on the world going the way you want, or on people behaving the way they should, or on their giving you all the things you like and want. Joyfulness isn’t dependent upon anything but your own willingness to be generous, kind, and loving. It’s that mature experience of giving, sharing, and developing the science of goodness. Virtuousness is the joy we can experience in this human realm. So, although what society is doing or what everyone else is doing is beyond my control-I can’t go around making everything how I want it- still, I can be kind, generous, and patient,and do good, and develop virtue. That I can do, and that’s worth doing, and not something anyone can stop me from doing. However rotten or corrupted society is doesn’t make any difference to our ability to be virtuous and to do good.

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What Attachment Is

Gill Washington Ajahn Sumedho, Attachment, Buddhist Writings, Love, Spirituality, Suffering , , , 0 Comment

Excerpted from The Mind and the Way

By Ajahn Sumedho

First, you must recognize what attachment is, and then you let go. That’s when you realize non-attachment. However, if you’re coming from the view that you shouldn’t be attached, then that’s still not it. The point is not to take a position against attachment, as if there were a commandment against it; the point is to observe. We ask the questions, “What is attachment?” “Does being attached to things bring happiness or suffering?” Then we begin to have insight. We begin to see what attachment is, and then we can let go.

If you’re coming from a high-minded position in which you think you shouldn’t be attached to anything, then you come up with ideas like, “Well, I can’t be a Buddhist because I love my wife, because I’m attached to my wife. I love her, and I just can’t let her go. I can’t send her away.” Those kinds of thoughts come from the view that you shouldn’t be attached.

The recognition of attachment doesn’t mean that you get rid of your wife. It means you free yourself from wrong views about yourself and your wife. Then you find that there’s love there, but it’s not attached. It’s not distorting, clinging, and grasping. The empty mind is quite capable of caring about others and loving in the pure sense of love. But any attachment will always distort that.

If you love someone and then start grasping, things get complicated; then, what you love causes you pain. For example, you love your children, but if you become attached to them, then you don’t really love them any more because you’re not with them as they are. You have all kinds of ideas about what they should be and what you want them to be. You want them to obey you, and you want them to be good, and you want them to pass their exams. With this attitude, you’re not really loving them, because if they don’t fulfill your wishes, you feel angry and frustrated and averse to them. So attachment to children prevents us from loving them. But as we let go of attachment, we find that our natural way of relating is to love. We find that we are able to allow our children to be as they are, rather than having fixed ideas of what we want them to be. When I talk to parents, they say how much suffering there is in having children, because there’s a lot of wanting. When we’re wanting them to be a certain way and not wanting them to be another way, we create this anguish and suffering in our minds. But the more we let go of that, the more we discover an amazing ability to be sensitive to, and aware of, children as they are. Then, of course, that openness allows them to respond rather than just react to our attachment. You know, a lot of children are just reacting to our saying, “I want you to be like this.

The empty mind-the pure mind-is not a blank where you’re not feeling or caring about anything. It’s an effulgence of the mind. It’s a brightness that is truly sensitive and accepting. It’s an ability to accept life as it is. When we accept life as it is, we can respond appropriately to the way we’re experiencing it, rather than just reacting out of fear and aversion.

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Impermanence

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 From: The Wisdom of No Escape

By Pema Chödrön

Impermanence means that the essence of life is fleeting. Some people are so skillful at their mindfulness practice that they can actually see each and every little movement of mind-changing, changing, changing. They can also feel body changing, changing, changing. It’s absolutely amazing. The heart pumps blood all the time and the blood keeps going and the food gets digested and the whole thing happens. It’s amazing and it’s very impermanent. Every time you travel in a car, that might be the end. If you get really paranoid, impermanence can drive you crazy because you’re scared to step off the curb, you’re scared to go out of your house. You realize how dangerous life is.

 

It’s good to realize how dangerous it is because that makes the sense of impermanence real. It is good to realize that you will die, that death is right there on your shoulder all the time. Many religions have meditations on death to let it penetrate our thick skulls that life doesn’t last forever. It might be over in the next instant! Sometimes it’s said that the end of every out-breath is actually the end; the opportunity is there to die completely. Suzuki Roshi gave the instructions, “Sit still. Don’t anticipate. Just be willing to die over and over again.” Let that be a reminder. Being willing to die over and over again heightens the first reminder, the sense of gratitude and preciousness. Impermanence can teach you a lot about how to cheer up. Sometimes let it scare you. It is said, “Practice as if your hair were on fire.”

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Life Is Very Brief

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From: The Wisdom of No Escape

By Pema Chödrön

Life is very brief. Even if we live to be a hundred, it’s very brief. Also, its length is unpredictable. Our lives are impermanent. I myself have, at the most, thirty more years to live, maybe thirty-five, but that would be tops. Maybe I have only twenty more years to live. Maybe I don’t even have one more day to live. It’s sobering to me to think that I don’t have all that long left. It makes me feel that I want to use it well. If you realize that you don’t have that many more years to live and if you live your life as if you actually had only a day left, then the sense of impermanence heightens that feeling of preciousness and gratitude. Traditionally it’s said that once you are born, you immediately start dying. I remember that in Boulder, every year the Hare Krishna people put up a display of life-sized figures starting with a newborn baby, through all the stages of life. You couldn’t help but identify with this figure getting bigger and stronger, in the prime of life, until the whole thing starts going downhill and the figure is shown getting older, with the final one a corpse. You don’t even know if you’re going to have the privilege of going through that whole process. Even if you do, impermanence is very real.

When you’re depressed, you may say to yourself, “Why bother to sit? Why bother to find out, for my own sake and for the sake of others, what this depression is about? Why does it drag me down? How come the sky was so blue yesterday and now everything is so gray? How come everyone was smiling at me yesterday and now they’re all frowning at me? How come yesterday I felt like I was doing everything right and today it seems I’m doing everything wrong? How come? How come? How come?” If you’re alone in retreat, you still get depressed. There’s no one to blame it on; it’s just this feeling that happens. You ask yourself, what is it? What is it? What is it? I want to know. How can I rouse myself? What can I do that’s not completely habitual? How can I get out of this rut? How do we stop the habitualness of our process? The teachings say, “Well, that’s why we sit. That’s what mindfulness is about. Look carefully. Pay attention to details.”

Remembering impermanence motivates you to go back and look at the teachings, to see what they tell you about how to work with your life, how to rouse yourself, how to cheer up, how to work with emotions. Still, sometimes you’ll read and read and you can’t find the answer anywhere. But then someone on a bus will tell you, or you’ll find it in the middle of a movie, or maybe even in a commercial on TV. If you really have these questions, you’ll find the answers everywhere. But if you don’t have a question, there’s certainly no answer.

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Satisfaction

Gill Washington Buddhist Writings, Enlightenment, Insight, Loving-Kindness, Meditation, Pema Chödrön, Spiritual Writers, Spirituality , , , 0 Comment

 From: The Wisdom of No Escape

By Pema Chödrön

It’s very helpful to realize that being here, sitting in meditation, doing simple everyday things like working, walking outside, talking with people, bathing, using the toilet, and eating, is actually all that we need to be fully awake, fully alive, fully human. It’s also helpful to realize that this body that we have, this very body that’s sitting here right now on this shrine room floor, this very body that perhaps aches because it’s only day two of the dathun, and this mind that we have at this very moment, are exactly what we need to be fully human, fully awake, and fully alive. Furthermore, the emotions that we have right now, the negativity and the positivity, are what we actually need. It is just as if we had looked around to find out what would be the greatest wealth that we could possibly possess in order to lead a decent, good, completely fulfilling, energetic, inspired life, and found it all right here.

Being satisfied with what we already have is a magical golden key to being alive in a full, unrestricted, and inspired way. One of the major obstacles to what is traditionally called enlightenment is resentment, feeling cheated, holding a grudge about who you are, where you are, what you are. This is why we talk so much about making friends with ourselves, because, for some reason or other, we don’t feel that kind of satisfaction in a full and complete way. Meditation is a process of lightening up, of trusting the basic goodness of what we have and who we are, and of realizing that any wisdom that exists, exists in what we already have. Our wisdom is all mixed up with what we call our neurosis. Our brilliance, our juiciness, our spiciness, is all mixed up with our craziness and our confusion, and therefore it doesn’t do any good to try to get rid of our so-called negative aspects, because in that process we also get rid of our basic wonderfulness. We can lead our life so as to become more awake to who we are and what we’re doing rather than trying to improve or change or get rid of who we are or what we’re doing. The key is to wake up, to become more alert, more inquisitive and curious about ourselves.

While we are sitting in meditation, we are simply exploring humanity and all of creation in the form of ourselves. We can become the world’s greatest experts on anger, jealousy, and self deprecation, as well as on joyfulness, clarity, and insight. Everything that human beings feel, we feel. We can become extremely wise and sensitive to all of humanity and the whole universe simply by knowing ourselves, just as we are.

We’re talking about loving-kindness again, in a slightly different way. The ground of loving-kindness is this sense of satisfaction with who we are and what we have. The path is a sense of wonder, becoming a two- or three-year-old child again, wanting to know all the unknowable things, beginning to question everything. We know we’re never really going to find the answers, because these kinds of questions come from having a hunger and a passion for life-they have nothing to do with resolving anything or tying it all up into a neat little package. This kind of questioning is the journey itself. The fruition lies in beginning to realize our kinship with all humanity. We realize that we have a share in whatever everyone else has and is. Our journey of making friends with ourselves is not a selfish thing. We’re not trying to get all the goodies for ourselves. It’s a process of developing loving-kindness and a true understanding for other people as well.

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Inconvenience

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From: Comfortable With Uncertainty

By Pema Chödrön

When you start to take the warrior’s journey, you’re going to find that it’s often extremely inconvenient. When you start to want to live your life fully instead of opting for death, you discover that life itself is inconvenient. Wholeheartedness is a precious gift, but no one can actually give it to you. You have to find the path that has heart and then walk it impeccably. In doing that, you again and again encounter the inconvenience of your own uptightness, your own headaches, your own falling flat on your face. But in wholeheartedly practicing and wholeheartedly following the path, this inconvenience is not an obstacle. It’s simply a certain texture of life, a certain energy of life.

Not only that, sometimes when you just get flying and all feels so good and you think, “This is it, this is that path that has heart,” you suddenly fall flat on your face. Everybody’s looking at you. You say to yourself, “What happened to that path that had heart? This feels like the path full of mud in my face. Since you are wholeheartedly committed to the warrior’s journey, it pricks you, it pokes you. It’s like someone laughing in your ear, challenging you to figure out what to do when you don’t know what to do. It humbles you. It opens your heart.

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