calm

Insight Meditation

Gill Washington Buddhist Writings, Insight, Joseph Goldstein, Meditation, Spirituality , , , , 0 Comment

Excerpted from Insight Meditation

By Joseph Goldstein

The insights of insight meditation are intuitive, not conceptual. Intuitive in this sense does not mean some kind of vague feeling about something; rather, it means clearly, directly seeing and experiencing how things really are.

For example, you are sitting in meditation, watching the breath. All of a sudden your mind settles into a different space. Even if it is just for a couple of moments, you feel a deeper kind of calm and peace. Instead of struggling to be with the breath, you begin just to rest with the breath in a very calm, effortless, way.

That is an insight through direct experience into the nature of calm and tranquillity. You do not think about them or reflect on them. You know that daffodils are yellow because you have seen them. You know the nature of calm and tranquillity because you have felt them in your heart.

There are many such experiences, and many levels of each one; and each time we know them directly, it is as if we open to a new way of seeing, of being. This is insight.

But often our mind becomes so excited by each new experience that we start thinking. “Look at that. I’m so calm. This is great Or we start reflecting discursively on impermanence or suffering or whatever the particular insight-experience has been.

We need to take a lot of care. If we fail to note such reflections and become caught up in them instead – and Dharma reflections can become extremely compelling and interesting – they themselves become a hindrance to deepening insight. Sometimes people become obsessed with Dharma thoughts, with reflections about genuine insights they have had.

So try to differentiate clearly between true intuitive insight and thinking about it. Knowing the difference can save you trouble and delay. You do not have to worry about later finding words to communicate your insights. Our mind very rarely has a problem coming up with the words. Simply staying present with each new arising appearance allows the whole Dharma journey to unfold.

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It Is A Beauteous Evening, Calm And Free

Gill Washington God, Nature, Poems, Spirituality, William Wordsworth , , , 0 Comment

By William Wordsworth

IT is a beauteous evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration; the broad sun
Is sinking down in its tranquillity;
The gentleness of heaven broods o’er the Sea:
Listen! the mighty Being is awake,
And doth with his eternal motion make
A sound like thunder–everlastingly.
Dear Child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here,
If thou appear untouched by solemn thought,
Thy nature is not therefore less divine:
Thou liest in Abraham’s bosom all the year;
And worship’st at the Temple’s inner shrine,
God being with thee when we know it not.

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The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

Gill Washington Poems, Spirituality, Truth, Wallace Stevens , , , 0 Comment

By Wallace Stevens

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

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