Sometimes when we start out trying to stabilize the mind and to develop a little concentration, we think that actually our mind’s getting worse. All you need is a couple of minutes of breathing meditation to see that’s true, don’t you? Does anybody do breathing meditation without having one single distracting thought?Īt the beginning, our mind is all over the place. It’s like if you are trying to balance something on the head of a pin, and it’s wobbling all the time, so our mind wobbles. If we want to use it to really focus deeply on something, we find that very difficult because the mind bounces around all the time you know it can’t stay stably on one object. We’re trying to make the mind stable, because right now our mind isn’t so stable, and I’m not talking about emotional stability and stuff like that. In stabilizing meditation what we’re trying to do is develop concentration. One is called stabilizing meditation-sometimes it’s translated as placement meditation-and the other one is analytical meditation or, as my teachers called it, checking meditation. If I’m going to talk about Buddhist meditation, we talk about two main meditation methods. In the class of meditation there are different ways of cutting up the pie. There are different kinds of meditation, and there are different ways of dividing. Meditation doesn’t work like that, it’s something that we do repeatedly, and we build up energy as we do it. I think that’s an important thing to remember because so often we want to just do something once, get the benefits and then go on. It’s a process of habituation, and so we say we practice meditation, meaning we do it over and over and over again. We’re trying to familiarize or habituate ourselves with realistic perspectives, with constructive ways of looking at things. The word meditate in Tibetan is “gom.” It’s the same verbal root as to familiarize or to habituate. That’s not meditation, meditation is what we’re doing with our mind, with our heart, how we’re directing our mind. But you know sitting there like this, you can have a clay figurine sitting there like that. Some general understanding: so, meditation you sit there like this. As soon as you find a word in Time magazine-something that used not to be an American word and then it’s in Time magazine-then chances are that maybe the public doesn’t have a totally correct understanding of it. But on the other hand, we really need to use words and concepts and talking to understand what meditation really is, because there is a lot of misunderstanding about what meditation is. The reason I said at the beginning that it sounds kind of funny to say that we’re going to talk about meditation is because meditation is something we do, and we’re not talking when we’re meditating. With this long-term view of compassionately working for the welfare of beings, let’s listen and discuss this morning. Instead, it’s something that we use to transform ourselves so that we can become of the greatest benefit to all others, and specifically to be able to work for their welfare extensively and to be able one day to lead them to enlightenment.
In other words, our spiritual practice is not something just to soothe our own misery. With that, let’s learn today and place what we’re doing within the context of being of great benefit to all living beings. Let’s cultivate our motivation and have a real sense of joy and delight at having so many good conditions in our life, especially at having an interest in spiritual matters and the opportunity to explore those interests, and the intelligence to really make use of what we learn when we explore.
Please note that the slides have been updated to reflect the new terminology used to describe different types of meditation in The Foundation of Buddhist Practice by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Venerable Thubten Chodron.
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