Transforming thru awareness
If we are new to meditation, we need first to train on how to rest awareness in an object (5 min a day) at least for one month. Then we must train to rest with pain. We can train with pain using the acupressure point in the hand [between the thumb and index].
Meditation
- Let the mind in its natural state
- Press your hand and feel the pain
- The pain is now your support
- We don’t fight with nor run away from pain, just feel it.
- Now rest your mind in open awareness again.
Now we made friends with pain, because we used as support for our meditation. When you look at pain, there are four possible expereinces:
- Pain disappears
- Pain remains but changed, transformed, moved from one place to another
- Pain stays equal and you can watch it
- Pain become bigger, stronger
All the experiences are good, only if the pain becomes really big you’d better stop.
Poison becomes medicine
This practice shows the way to deal with
any disturbing experience: anger, sadness, dullness, sleepiness. All become support for our meditation. They become friends, and help us to develop
awareness. When we feel a disturbing
emotion and we don’t fight it, we develop compassion. We feel it as they are, without changing,
reacting or removing, and that’s the wisdom, seeing the reality as it is.
Sometimes when we look at the disturbance
it will be still too much. Then we must
turn our attention to something easy. For
example, change focus to another emotion less intense. At the beginning we may struggle welcoming
disturbing emotions. We may approach them with a fake welcome, but even a fake
welcome is useful because we start dissolving our aversion.
Therefore, the practice of watching the
emotion has as first benefit that you make friends with it. Secondly, when you see the river, you are out
of the river. When you see the emotion,
you are automatically creating a gap, and you are not carried by it. If the emotion disappears it is also great,
because then you experience a non-conceptual state.
When you see the emotion, your awareness becomes bigger than the
emotion.
Wisdom
If we start looking closely, feeling it,
not staying with our assumptions about the kleshas or suffering, we connect
with our wisdom.
Meditation
- Rest your mind in open awareness
- Look at the disturbing emotion. If you can’t find it, rest in the gap. If there is a very strong emotion, first look a weaker emotion.
- Watch closely it, and ask, “Where is my emotion?” Maybe you will cry, or laugh. If your emotion disappear it is also very good.
- Rest your mind again in open awareness
When you look where the emotion is, you may not find it. That means that you
already begun wisdom. Wisdom is the
opposite of ignorance, that is the
landmark of the unhealthy sense of self, the perception of things as permanent,
singular and independent, perceiving the emotion as one thing and being part of
us. In reality, it is made of pieces:
sensation, thought, label, object, beliefs. Although we perceive the emotion as having an
entity, in fact is all the pieces linked. For example, if we hate something and we
remove the object, does the hate hold? Therefore, emotion is interdependent and
changing all the time, impermanent.
How to transcend the emotion?
We look at the pieces, at the changes, and
we discover we cannot find anything, yet we can still feel something, but the
emotion is not solid, it’s not real.
We can experience it by looking at my face. Look at it closer. Maybe you are looking at my eyes. Without changing the direction of your eyes,
can you see my chin clearly? No, you can’t.
You only see clearly the eyes. We
can continue the process: narrowing down to one eye, then the eyeball, next
only the iris, etc. Although we think we
see the full face clearly, it is just a mental reconstruction of my face.
We can also experience with sounds. My name is Mingyur Rinpoche, but to pronounce it, we extend over time. When you hear “Rin”, “gyur” is already gone, and “po” has not arrived yet. Therefore, we cannot pinpoint the moment where the name is pronounced. This is emptiness. Although something appears, we cannot pinpoint. Realizing that is the wisdom. When we see, hear, or think we experience the wisdom, but we don’t recognize it. That summarizes the practice of wisdom. We don’t do anything. We just experience and recognize that we cannot grasp it, and we rest with that. This wisdom is already present and free. Actually, nothing can bind us. What bind us is our own concept, made by our fixation mind.
Meditation
- Rest your mind in open awareness, just be.
- Whatever comes to your mind, be with it, vividly present, but noticing that you cannot really grasp them. Rest with it, as it is.
- That’s it.
You can also apply reasoning asking, “Who
hates whom?” It is emptiness, just like a dream. The person is also empty, and the hatred is
just like a dream. The hatred maybe disappears
a few seconds, and then comes back again, maybe stronger than before.
We can mistake this view if we just pretend, by intellectual understanding that things are empty, but they appear vividly. That would be nihilism. For example, if someone hits me it is not enough to say, “The person is empty” and “The pain is empty.”
In the end, all the emotions become wisdom
(the five kleshas become the five wisdoms), the positive aspect of the emotion
remains, while the ignorant (permanent, singular, independent) aspect
disappears. Like the gold mixed with
mud, by refining it, its qualities become clearer.
Next time you get angry ask, “Who is
angry?” and the anger maybe will disappear a few seconds. Or just be with the anger, seeing its
impermanence, yet you can see it. These
are the methods: by questioning, and by seeing and resting as it is.
In summary we have explained three methods and we can choose which one seems appropriate. Using always the same method will not work. Even if we are using transcending or transforming a lot, sometimes abandoning can be more effective. Whatever method we use their essence is awareness, loving-kindness, wisdom, and all the three qualities in union.