..續本文上一頁build up your credit, where you build up the causes for success. While working for peace in the hard meditations, you build up your strength, the momentum for peace. Then when there”s enough credit of good qualities, the mind goes into a good meditation and it feels like ”pay day”. It is in the bad meditations that you do most of the work.
At a recent retreat that I gave in Sydney, during interview time, a lady told me that she had been angry with me all day, but for two different reasons. In her early meditations she was having a difficult time and was angry with me for not ringing the bell to end the meditation early enough. In the later meditations she got into a beautiful peaceful state and was angry with me for ringing the bell too soon. The sessions were all the same length, exactly one hour. You just can”t win as a teacher, ringing the bell!
This is what happens when you go anticipating the future, thinking, ”How many more minutes until the bell goes
” That is where you torture, yourself, where you pick up a heavy burden that is none of your business. So be very careful not to pick up the heavy suitcase of ”How many more minutes are there to go
” or ”What should I do next
” If that is what you are thinking, then you are not paying attention to what is happening now. You are not doing the meditation. You have lost the plot and are asking for trouble.
In this stage of the meditation keep your attention right in the present moment, to the point where you don”t even know what day it is or what time it is-morning
afternoon
--don”t know! All you know is what moment it is-right now! In this way you arrive at this beautiful monastic time scale where you are just meditating in the moment, not aware of how many minutes have gone or how many remain, not even remembering what day it is.
Once, as a young monk in Thailand, I had actually forgotten what year it was! It is marvellous living in that realm that is timeless, a realm so much more free than the time-driven world we usually have to live in. In the timeless realm, you experience this moment, just as all wise beings have been experiencing this same moment for thousands of years. It has always been just like this, no different. You have come into the reality of ”now”.
The reality of now is magnificent and awesome. When you have abandoned all past and all future, it is as if you have come alive. You are here, you are mindful. This is the first stage of the meditation, just this mindfulness sustained only in the present. Reaching here, you have done a great deal. You have let go of the first burden which stops deep meditation. So put forth a lot of effort to reach this first stage until it is strong, firm and well established. Next we will refine the present moment awareness into the second stage of the meditation - silent awareness of the present moment.
PART 2
”Silence is so much more productive of wisdom and clarity than thinking. ”
In part 1, I outlined the goal of this meditation, which is the beautiful silence, stillness and clarity of mind, pregnant with the most profound of insights. Then I pointed out the underlying theme which runs like an unbroken thread throughout all meditation, that is the letting go of material and mental burdens. Lastly, in Part 1, I described at length the practice which leads to what I call the first stage of this meditation, and that first stage is attained when the meditator comfortably abides in the present moment for long, unbroken periods of time. I made the point that ”The reality of now is magnificent and awesome... Reaching, here you have done a great deal. You have let go of the first burden which stops deep meditation.” But having achieved so much, one should go further into the even more beautiful and truthful silence …
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