Love is taking care of oneself by freeing one’s mind of worries and conducting
one self with propriety. ~Master Cheng Yen
The empty mind – the pure mind – is not a blank, zero-land, 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.
~Ajahn Sumedho
“There will always be suffering. But we must not suffer over the suffering.” ~Alan Watts
“ Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. And intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you’ll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.” ~ Janet Fitch
Of course we can always imagine more perfect conditions, how it should be ideally,
how everyone should behave. But it is not our task to create an ideal. It’s our task
to see how it is, and to learn from the world as it is. For the awakening of the heart,
conditions are always good enough. ~Ajahn Sumedho
Meditate bhikkhu! Don’t be heedless!
Don’t let pleasures whirl the mind!
Heedless, do not gulp a glob of iron!
Bewail not when burning, ‘This is dukkha’!
~Dhammapada
Explanation: O monk, meditate and do not be indolent. Do not allow your mind to loiter among sensual pleasures. If you allow it, it will be like having iron balls forced down your throat in hell. You will bewail your fate crying, “This is suffering,” Do not allow it to happen. Source: Buddhanet
You respect your mind, so you are more careful what you put in it. If you have a nice house, you don’t go out and pick up all the filth from the street and bring it in, you bring in things that will enhance it and make it a refreshing and delightful place.
If you are going to identify with anything, then don’t identify with mortal conditions. See what identification is – investigate your own mind to see clearly the nature of thought, of memory, of sense consciousness, and of feeling as impermanent conditions. Bring your awareness to the slower things, to the transiency of bodily sensation; investigate pain and see it as a moving energy, a changing condition. Emotionally, it seems permanent when you are in pain, but that is just an illusion of the emotions – let go of it all. Even if you have insight, even if you understand everything clearly – let go of the insight.
When the mind is empty, say ‘ Who is it that lets go?’ Ask the question, try to find out who it is, what it is that lets go. Bring up that not-knowing state with the word Who – ‘Who am I? Who lets go?’ A state of uncertainty arises; bring this up, allow it to be . . . and there is emptiness, voidness, the state of uncertainty when the mind just goes blank.
I keep stressing this right understanding, right attitude, right intention, more towards simplifying your life so that you aren’t involved in unskilful and complex activities. So that you don’t live heedlessly, exploiting others and having no respect for yourself or the people around you. Develop the Precepts as a standard, and develop nekkhamma – renunciation of that which is unskilful or unnecessary – and then mentally let go of greed, let go of hatred, let go of delusion. ~Ajahn Sumedho
Buddha-wisdom is just that much: knowing the conditioned as the conditioned, and the Unconditioned as the Unconditioned. Buddhas rest in the Unconditioned, and no longer, unless it’s necessary, seek absorption into anything. They are no longer deluded by any conditions, and they incline to the Unconditioned, the spaciousness, the emptiness, rather than towards the changing conditions within the space.
In your meditation now, as you incline towards the emptiness of the mind, towards the spaciousness of the mind, your habitual grasping, fascination, revulsions, fears, doubts and worries about the conditions lessen. You begin to recognise they’re just things that come and go: they’re not-self, nothing to get excited about or depressed about, they are as they are. We can allow conditions to be just as they are, because they come and go – their nature is to go away, so we don’t have to make them go away. We’re free and patient and enduring enough to allow things to take their natural course. In this way, we liberate ourselves from the struggle, strife, and the confusion of the ignorant mind that has to spend all its time evaluating and discriminating, trying to hold onto something, trying to get rid of something. ~Ajahn Sumedho
by Ajahn Chah
Just as animal life can be classified into two groups, creatures of the land and creatures of the sea, subjects of meditation can be divided into two categories, concentration and insight. Concentration meditations are those that are used to make the mind calm and one pointed. Insight, on the one hand, is the growing perception of impermanence, suffering, and emptiness of self and, on the other, our bridge over those waters.
No matter how we may feel about our existence, our business is not to try to change it in any way. Rather, we just have to see it and let it be. Where suffering is, there too is the way out of suffering. Seeing that which is born and dies and is subject to suffering, Buddha knew there must also be something beyond birth and death, free of suffering.
Methods of meditation all have value in helping to develop mindfulness. The point is to use mindfulness to see the underlying truth. With this mindfulness, we watch all desires, likes and dislikes, pleasures and pains that arise in the mind. Realizing they are impermanent, suffering, and empty of self, we let go of them. In this way, wisdom replaces ignorance, knowledge replaces doubt.
As for singling out one object of meditation, you yourself must discover what fits your character. Wherever you choose to be mindful, it will bring wisdom to the mind. Mindfulness is knowing what is here, noticing, being aware. Clear comprehension knows the context in which the present is occurring. When mindfulness and clear comprehension act together, their companion, wisdom, always appears to help them complete any task.
Watch the mind, watch the process of experience arising and ceasing. At first the movement is constant as soon as one thing passes, another arises, and we seem to see more arising than ceasing. As time goes by we see more clearly, understanding how things arise so fast, until we reach the point where they arise, cease, and do not arise again.
With mindfulness you can see the real owner of things. Do you think this is your world, your body? It is the world’s world, the body’s body. If you tell it, Don’t get old, does the body listen? Does your stomach ask permission to get sick? We only rent this house; why not find out who really owns it?
Another practice which is beneficial, as it counteracts states of mind rooted in aversion (dosa) is metta-bhavana, widely practiced by people in Buddhist countries. The advantages are many, ranging from an increase in personal happiness, through such social benefits as having many good friends, to ease of meditation practice, dying unconfused and at least gaining a good rebirth. So as part of one’s daily practice one should recite this traditional passage used in all the Buddhist countries of Southeast Asia.
May I have no enmity
may I have no hurtfulness
may I have no troubles of mind and body
may I be able to protect my own happiness
Whatever beings there are —
may they have no enmity
whatever beings there are —
may they have no hurtfulness
whatever beings there are —
may they have no troubles of mind and body
whatever beings there are —
may they be able to protect their own happiness.
While chanting both these recollections one should not be too hurried. Take time over them and pause for reflection after each phrase has been chanted. In this way one prepares the mind for the next part of one’s practice.
Let things be according to their nature. If there is no movement in the mind,
we abide in equanimity, and if something comes up we ask ourselves:
does this cause suffering? Am I holding with attachment? Is there anything here?
If we practice and get to this point I think all of us will realise genuine peace.
~Ajahn Chah
