Ch. 3 - Meditate Intelligently, Don’t Loose the Woods from the Trees

How to Choose when to use different Meditation Techniques

We Must Reflect on the Current State of our Mind to Decide on the Best Way to Meditate

[This discourse was given in response to a question posed by a student who was confused about what to practise. It looks at when it is appropriate to practise various techniques.]

How to Choose when to use different Meditation Techniques

Someone asked me a question yesterday. He said “Just after I did retreat with you last time, I did another workshop with another teacher and where you had been telling me that I should practise my concentration and learn to sit in serenity for longer periods, they told me that I should just tune into awareness for very short periods of time, very regularly. Now I am a bit confused as to what should be my practice?”

So I thought that I would give a little talk about how and what we should practise and when.

Firstly, I think that it is very important that we realise that there is no one meditation technique that is going to carry us from the beginning to the end of the path. Or it is very unlikely that any one will. Secondly, we need to realise that without the guidance of a teacher it is probably likely that we will get lost in various cul-de-sacs along the way and probably spend much time practising in a way that is not necessarily the most efficient for our progress.

So, what practice we should do will vary from time to time, and it will vary depending upon what our objectives are, and where we are at. So, we should see it in terms of where we are at on the path, what we hope to achieve and what is our character. These three factors will determine what would be the most effective way for us to practise. And usually it will be necessary, and certainly helpful for a teacher to point us in the right direction. But if we didn’t have a teacher it would certainly be appropriate to make reflections upon what might be the best way for us to practise.

What would I say to that person who said that they had met a teacher who had asked them to practice only briefly for regular periods of time by tuning into awareness itself? Well yes, this is a practice and it is a useful practice. And we should understand what it offers us, in the same way that we should understand what kasiṇa meditation offers us or what four elements meditation offers us.

The practice of Rigpa, where we rest upon awareness itself, without deliberately taking any object of concentration or mindfulness, is a sophisticated practice. It’s one that we should probably practise at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of our time spent practising meditation. At the beginning, middle and end it will produce different effects. So it is something that we should put into our spreadsheet as a very important and key practice. But perhaps we should also understand why it is unlikely to be sufficient on its own.

I think it is useful to think of it like this. If you were to see your mind as a camera, a camera can perform many functions but its single function is to register information visually and record it. Well, our mind registers and records information in myriad ways, it registers it and records it.

If you were to take a disposable camera that you would buy for £3.99 in your local pharmacy and try to record the experiences of your life on it, first of all you would have a very limited range of vision and the perspective would be very limited, the quality of the aperture would be poor and the quality of the registration upon the film would not be pure. You would get a vague image. No doubt it could record the information in such a way that you might recognise it. But it would not necessarily be a pristine image.

But if you were to buy a camera that had interchangeable lens, variable aperture times and then use the highest quality film, that camera would be able to zoom in on a distant object and see it very clearly, it would be able to open out into a very broad perspective and take in the bigger picture. And you would also perhaps have a microscopic lens that could go into very, very fine detail on very small objects, very close up so that they might be scrutinised even to the point of being something akin to a microscope.

Now this is our mind, and the quality of our experience is always determined by the quality of the mind that registers that experience. Now the argument for the direct approach is that awareness is pure and pristine, and yes indeed it is pure and pristine and there is a higher capacity within all of us that registers information perfectly. But the egoic mind that you are most likely using as a reference point for your reality is not vast in its perspective, it cannot look far into the distance and see, it cannot hone closely in on something so that it can be seen very, very clearly for what it is. And in the same way, the heart base that registers, that records your experiences, is most definitely not always mirror-like in its capacity to reflect.

So we develop, we train our meditation and we train it in a number of ways: so that we can develop this telescopic capacity to look far into things; this wide angle, broad perspective so that we can see a bigger picture; and also we develop this microscopic capacity to break things down and to see deeply into things in great detail.

And not every meditation subject does all of these things. So we would see the practice of the kasiṇas, and the development of samādhi as a perfecting of the lens. The maturing of equanimity and the stilling of the heart base as the refining of the film upon which out impressions are captured. The resting in awareness itself, as an opening up, taking a bigger perspective, seeing through the apparent to allow it to reveal more hidden information. And the honing in on the four elements, breaking down the body into its constituent parts, breaking the mind down, and the vipassanā practice, this is to develop a microscopic capacity so we see into things in great detail. And then this looking into, seeing more deeply into things, this is the maturing of our insight. So we are training different muscles by the way in which we meditate. We are polishing our lens, we are broadening our aperture, we are quickening our reaction time, and we are stilling the mirror that reflects our experiences.

One who is asked to simply tune into awareness and rest in it for five minutes while the mind is still disturbed and shaking, will still get a very distorted image of reality, because the mirror in which they are reflecting reality is still very disturbed. So the moon appearing in that mirror might quite possibly appear as anything but the moon.

So while awareness itself is always and everywhere vast, spacious and mirror-like, the mind, that our experiences are most often filtered through as they register in our awareness, is a very distorting lens. So to see reality as it is, to fathom its depth, its deep innate truths so that we can live in alignment with them, we may well have to train our capacity to look broadly at the bigger picture and develop a wide perspective, as well as to be able to look deeply into things, or to focus upon them, break them down and see them in minute detail. And this is the whole path of samatha and vipassanā, training all of these qualities from deep stillness and equanimity so that we can register our experiences clearly, undistortedly, from a broader perspective so that our mind is not narrow, our views are not narrow. And we need to learn to break things down so that our experiences are not appearing to us as compact so that we are not lost in the compactness, or in the appearance of things so that we can see things as they are, instead of getting lost in concepts.

And certainly, when we have seen things to be the way they are, then it remains for us to just rest effortlessly within them, and leave them as they are. And then the practice, every now and then, of attuning to awareness, recognising it, while leaving everything else alone, becomes an evermore significant practice until eventually it becomes our only practice. To rest effortlessly within ourselves and leave everything as it is, is a complete practice, of course, and in the end there is no practice beyond this. But to take it as the only practice while the mind is still shaking, while the perspective is narrow, while we cannot see far, while we cannot see clearly into our experience or haven’t done so, is unlikely to be sufficient on its own.

We Must Reflect on the Current State of our Mind to Decide on the Best Way to Meditate

So we must understand that it is necessary to reflect upon how our mind currently tends to function when trying to decide what would be the best way to meditate. And to those who would say it is not necessary to concentrate, it is only necessary to develop mindfulness and wisdom – well, that mindfulness and that wisdom arriving at a heart that is full of vexation and shaking is likely to cause only more vexation, but that mindfulness and insight that lands in a heart base that is stable from concentration and the equanimity it brings, that heart base is likely to be able to assimilate that mindfulness and that wisdom in such a way that it can accept the truth it points towards for what it is.

The quality of your mind is utterly determining the quality of your experience every moment. It is one thing to recognise that the innate quality of your mind is pure, but if you are not operating from that innate quality of your mind, if you are not experiencing your life and the world around from the very basic ground of your being, if you are experiencing your life from the perspective of your lower mind and you are still lost in your sense of self, it is not enough to take as the path the simple teaching that we should just rest effortlessly within ourselves and leave everything as it is, even though it is the complete teaching.

So be wary of taking practices that are very deep and very profound and which are very broad and very far-reaching, too early. There is an adage that says, “Such teachings should not be whispered downwind of one who is not ready to hear them.” And it might well be that it is said like that because we want to seek the resolution that most suits us and it would certainly suit us to be told that there isn’t anything to do, there is no meditation, there is no need to concentrate; it would make life very easy.

But we need to understand the point at which this simple teaching – to rest effortlessly within yourself and leave everything as it is – becomes a complete teaching, which is when you have developed deep and profound concentration, mindfulness and insight. The truth, the depth, the innate wisdom of such a teaching reveals itself in stages as these qualities mature in you. So don’t short-change yourself. Develop that lens that really can see, even though you will come to realise in the end that it is just a lens, it isn’t reality itself, any more than the finger that points at the moon is not the moon. In the same way we let the Dhamma go and we let the Abhidhamma go and all the instructions that carried us along the way, even the map, we let it all go. Also eventually we let that mind that we have spent so many years cultivating, we let that go too. But until you have gone beyond it, it remains the vehicle that will carry you there. The quality of your life until that time that you are free of your mind, will be utterly conditioned by the quality of it.

So work on the refinement of your character and the cultivation of your mind every bit as diligently as you would work on developing your relationship to that basic ground of awakening itself. While you are learning to rest effortlessly within yourself and learning to leave everything as it is so that you can just be at one with it, also continue to take the time to cultivate that mind that remains in the way, separating you from that which you are experiencing. Let the lens become finer and finer. Through practice, the capacity of the mind to distort becomes less and less until it also becomes a pure mirror, a pure reflector and a pure capacity to experience what it is that it beholds.

But it takes time and often much effort. So don’t be in a hurry to adopt what might at first appear to be a quicker route. There are no short cuts. What you need to do to free yourself must be done...by you. Self-honestly is your biggest ally. It may be that some rare individuals swiftly freed themselves using a very direct approach. But that will only be because they had very little dust in their eyes and a vast accumulation of pāramīs from previous efforts.

Look at your character. Look deeply into it. If you left it as it is would it show you only virtue, compassion and selflessness? If it does, then indeed, you are ready to rest effortlessly and leave everything as it is. But if not, there is work still to do.