Buddhist Meditation

Meditation Classes, Semester 2, 2011

Introduction to Buddhist Meditation – Six Week Course

Tuesday Lunchtime
Classes: 12.15 – 1.00pm

Commencing September 6, goes to October 11.

The Introduction to Buddhist Meditation classes will cover the basic
practice of meditation with reference to a range of core teachings from the
Dharma. By participating in the six week program, participants will experience a
range of ways to strengthen access to a calm sense of centredness and
groundedness, The classes will cover meditation posture, enlivening body
awareness, use of the breath in meditation, meditation on metta (loving
kindness), calming the mind and meditation in everyday life.

No prior experience of meditation practice is necessary. People who have previous
experience who wish to strengthen their practice are also welcome. These
sessions are free but donations to MUBSS are welcome. Chairs are usually used
but cushions are available on request.

Please note: A commitment to the six weeks of classes is a requirement;
the meditation skills are built both inside and outside the class across the six weeks

Teacher:  Dr. Bill
Genat leads meditation courses on behalf of MUBSS and has done so for the past
six years. Bill also teaches meditation for beginners and experienced
practitioners at Open Path Meditation: http://www.openpathmeditation.com.au

Registration and Enquiries: bgenat(at)unimelb.edu.au

Please note that Bill will be away until August 22nd and will respond to enquiries after that date.

Articles on meditation:

• Meditation stabilizes perception
• Mind & Life Research Initiative

Meditation Misconceptions

Misconception #1

Meditation is just a relaxation
technique

The bugaboo here is the word ‘just’. Relaxation is a key
component of meditation, but Vipassana-style meditation aims at a much loftier
goal. Nevertheless, the statement is essentially true for many other systems of
meditation. All meditation procedures stress concentration of the mind, bringing
the mind to rest on one item or one area of thought. Do it strongly and
thoroughly enough, and you achieve a deep and blissful relaxation which is
called Jhana. It is a state of such supreme tranquility that it amounts to
rapture. It is a form of pleasure which lies above and beyond anything that can
be experienced in the normal state of consciousness. Most systems stop right
there. That is the goal, and when you attain that, you simply repeat the
experience for the rest of your life. Not so with Vipassana meditation.
Vipassana seeks another goal–awareness. Concentration and relaxation are
considered necessary concomitants to awareness. They are required precursors,
handy tools, and beneficial byproducts. But they are not the goal. The goal is
insight. Vipassana meditation is a profound religious practice aimed at nothing
less that the purification and transformation of your everyday life. We will
deal more thoroughly with the differences between concentration and insight in
Chapter 14.

Misconception #2

Meditation means going into
a trance

Here again the statement could be applied accurately to
certain systems of meditation, but not to Vipassana. Insight meditation is not a
form of hypnosis. You are not trying to black out your mind so as to become
unconscious. You are not trying to turn yourself into an emotionless vegetable.
If anything, the reverse is true. You will become more and more attuned to your
own emotional changes. You will learn to know yourself with ever- greater
clarity and precision. In learning this technique, certain states do occur which
may appear trance-like to the observer. But they are really quite the opposite.
In hypnotic trance, the subject is susceptible to control by another party,
whereas in deep concentration the meditator remains very much under his own
control. The similarity is superficial, and in any case the occurrence of these
phenomena is not the point of Vipassana. As we have said, the deep concentration
of Jhana is a tool or stepping stone on the route of heightened awareness.
Vipassana by definition is the cultivation of mindfulness or awareness. If you
find that you are becoming unconscious in meditation, then you aren’t
meditating, according to the definition of the word as used in the Vipassana
system. It is that simple.

Misconception #3

Meditation
is a mysterious practice which cannot be understood

Here again, this
is almost true, but not quite. Meditation deals with levels of consciousness
which lie deeper than symbolic thought. Therefore, some of the data about
meditation just won’t fit into words. That does not mean, however, that it
cannot be understood. There are deeper ways to understand things than words. You
understand how to walk. You probably can’t describe the exact order in which
your nerve fibers and your muscles contract during that process. But you can do
it. Meditation needs to be understood that same way, by doing it. It is not
something that you can learn in abstract terms. It is to be experienced.
Meditation is not some mindless formula which gives automatic and predictable
results. You can never really predict exactly what will come up in any
particular session. It is an investigation and experiment and an adventure every
time. In fact, this is so true that when you do reach a feeling of
predictability and sameness in your practice, you use that as an indicator. It
means that you have gotten off the track somewhere and you are headed for
stagnation. Learning to look at each second as if it were the first and only
second in the universe is most essential in Vipassana
meditation.

Misconception #4

The purpose of meditation
is to become a psychic superman

No, the purpose of meditation is to
develop awareness. Learning to read minds is not the point. Levitation is not
the goal. The goal is liberation. There is a link between psychic phenomena and
meditation, but the relationship is somewhat complex. During early stages of the
meditator’s career, such phenomena may or may not arise. Some people may
experience some intuitive understanding or memories from past lives; others do
not. In any case, these are not regarded as well-developed and reliable psychic
abilities. Nor should they be given undue importance. Such phenomena are in fact
fairly dangerous to new meditators in that they are too seductive. They can be
an ego trap which can lure you right off the track. Your best advice is not to
place any emphasis on these phenomena. If they come up, that’s fine. If they
don’t, that’s fine, too. It’s unlikely that they will. There is a point in the
meditator’s career where he may practice special exercises to develop psychic
powers. But this occurs way down the line. After he has gained a very deep stage
of Jhana, the meditator will be far enough advanced to work with such powers
without the danger of their running out of control or taking over his life. He
will then develop them strictly for the purpose of service to others. This state
of affairs only occurs after decades of practice. Don’t worry about it. Just
concentrate on developing more and more awareness. If voices and visions pop up,
just notice them and let them go. Don’t get involved.

Misconception
#5

Meditation is dangerous and a prudent person should avoid
it

Everything is dangerous. Walk across the street and you may get
hit by a bus. Take a shower and you could break your neck. Meditate and you will
probably dredge up various nasty-matters from your past. The suppressed material
that has been buried there for quite some time can be scary. It is also highly
profitable. No activity is entirely without risk, but that does not mean that we
should wrap ourselves in some protective cocoon. That is not living. That is
premature death. The way to deal with danger is to know approximately how much
of it there is, where it is likely to be found and how to deal with it when it
arises. That is the purpose of this manual. Vipassana is development of
awareness. That in itself is not dangerous, but just the opposite. Increased
awareness is the safeguard against danger. Properly done, meditation is a very
gently and gradual process. Take it slow and easy, and development of your
practice will occur very naturally. Nothing should be forced. Later, when you
are under the close scrutiny and protective wisdom of a competent teacher, you
can accelerate your rate of growth by taking a period of intensive meditation.
In the beginning, though, easy does it. Work gently and everything will be
fine.

Misconception #6

Meditation is for saints and holy
men, not for regular people

You find this attitude very prevalent in
Asia, where monks and holy men are accorded an enormous amount of ritualized
reverence. This is somewhat akin to the American attitude of idealizing movie
stars and baseball heroes. Such people are stereotyped, made larger than life,
and saddled with all sort of characteristics that few human beings can ever live
up to. Even in the West, we share some of this attitude about meditation. We
expect the meditator to be some extraordinarily pious figure in whose mouth
butter would never dare to melt. A little personal contact with such people will
quickly dispel this illusion. They usually prove to be people of enormous energy
and gusto, people who live their lives with amazing vigor. It is true, of
course, that most holy men meditate, but they don’t meditate because they are
holy men. That is backward. They are holy men because they meditate. Meditation
is how they got there. And they started meditating before they became holy. This
is an important point. A sizable number of students seems to feel that a person
should be completely moral before he begins meditation. It is an unworkable
strategy. Morality requires a certain degree of mental control. It’s a
prerequisite. You can’t follow any set of moral precepts without at least a
little self-control, and if your mind is perpetually spinning like a fruit
cylinder in a one- armed bandit, self-control is highly unlikely. So mental
culture has to come first.

There are three integral factors in Buddhist
meditation — morality, concentration and wisdom. Those three factors grow
together as your practice deepens. Each one influences the other, so you
cultivate the three of them together, not one at a time. When you have the
wisdom to truly understand a situation, compassion towards all the parties
involved is automatic, and compassion means that you automatically restrain
yourself from any thought, word or deed that might harm yourself or others. Thus
your behavior is automatically moral. It is only when you don’t understand
things deeply that you create problems. If you fail to see the consequences of
your own action, you will blunder. The fellow who waits to become totally moral
before he begins to meditate is waiting for a ‘but’ that will never come. The
ancient sages say that he is like a man waiting for the ocean to become calm so
that he can go take a bath. To understand this relationship more fully, let us
propose that there are levels of morality. The lowest level is adherence to a
set of rules and regulations laid down by somebody else. It could be your
favorite prophet. It could be the state, the head man of your tribe or your
father. No matter who generates the rules, all you’ve got to do at this level is
know the rules and follow them. A robot can do that. Even a trained chimpanzee
could do it if the rules were simple enough and he was smacked with a stick
every time he broke one. This level requires no meditation at all. All you need
are the rules and somebody to swing the stick.

The next level of morality
consists of obeying the same rules even in the absence of somebody who will
smack you. You obey because you have internalized the rules. You smack yourself
every time you break one. This level requires a bit of mind control. If your
thought pattern is chaotic, your behavior will be chaotic, too. Mental culture
reduces mental chaos.

There is a third level or morality, but it might be
better termed ethics. This level is a whole quantum layer up the scale, a real
paradigm shift in orientation. At the level of ethics, one does not follow hard
and fast rules dictated by authority. One chooses his own behavior according to
the needs of the situation. This level requires real intelligence and an ability
to juggle all the factors in every situation and arrive at a unique, creative
and appropriate response each time. Furthermore, the individual making these
decisions needs to have dug himself out of his own limited personal viewpoint.
He has to see the entire situation from an objective point of view, giving equal
weight to his own needs and those of others. In other words, he has to be free
from greed, hatred, envy and all the other selfish junk that ordinarily keeps us
from seeing the other guy’s side of the issue. Only then can he choose that
precise set of actions which will be truly optimal for that situation. This
level of morality absolutely demands meditation, unless you were born a saint.
There is no other way to acquire the skill. Furthermore, the sorting process
required at this level is exhausting. If you tried to juggle all those factors
in every situation with your conscious mind, you’d wear yourself out. The
intellect just can’t keep that many balls in the air at once. It is an overload.
Luckily, a deeper level of consciousness can do this sort of processing with
ease. Meditation can accomplish the sorting process for you. It is an eerie
feeling.

One day you’ve got a problem–say to handle Uncle Herman’s
latest divorce. It looks absolutely unsolvable, and enormous muddle of ‘maybes’
that would give Solomon himself the willies. The next day you are washing the
dishes, thinking about something else entirely, and suddenly the solution is
there. It just pops out of the deep mind and you say, ‘Ah ha!’ and the whole
thing is solved. This sort of intuition can only occur when you disengage the
logic circuits from the problem and give the deep mind the opportunity to cook
up the solution. The conscious mind just gets in the way. Meditation teaches you
how to disentangle yourself from the thought process. It is the mental art of
stepping out of your own way, and that’s a pretty useful skill in everyday life.
Meditation is certainly not some irrelevant practice strictly for ascetics and
hermits. It is a practical skill that focuses on everyday events and has
immediate application in everybody’s life. Meditation is not other- worldly.

Unfortunately, this very fact constitutes the drawback for certain
students. They enter the practice expecting instantaneous cosmic revelation,
complete with angelic choirs. What they usually get is a more efficient way to
take out the trash and better ways to deal with Uncle Herman. They are
needlessly disappointed. The trash solution comes first. The voices of
archangels take a bit longer.

Misconception
#7

Meditation is running away from reality

Incorrect.
Meditation is running into reality. It does not insulate you from the pain of
life. It allows you to delve so deeply into life and all its aspects that you
pierce the pain barrier and you go beyond suffering. Vipassana is a practice
done with the specific intention of facing reality, to fully experience life
just as it is and to cope with exactly what you find. It allows you to blow
aside the illusions and to free yourself from all those polite little lies you
tell yourself all the time. What is there is there. You are who you are, and
lying to yourself about your own weaknesses and motivations only binds you
tighter to the wheel of illusion. Vipassana meditation is not an attempt to
forget yourself or to cover up your troubles. It is learning to look at yourself
exactly as you are. See what is there, accept it fully. Only then can you change
it.

Misconception #8

Meditation is a great way to get
high

Well, yes and no. Meditation does produce lovely blissful
feelings sometimes. But they are not the purpose, and they don’t always occur.
Furthermore, if you do meditation with that purpose in mind, they are less
likely to occur than if you just meditate for the actual purpose of meditation,
which is increased awareness. Bliss results from relaxation, and relaxation
results from release of tension. Seeking bliss from meditation introduces
tension into the process, which blows the whole chain of events. It is a
Catch-22. You can only have bliss if you don’t chase it. Besides, if euphoria
and good feelings are what you are after, there are easier ways to get them.
They are available in taverns and from shady characters on the street corners
all across the nation. Euphoria is not the purpose of meditation. It will often
arise, but it to be regarded as a by- product. Still, it is a very pleasant
side-effect, and it becomes more and more frequent the longer you meditate. You
won’t hear any disagreement about this from advanced
practitioners.

Misconception #9

Meditation is
selfish

It certainly looks that way. There sits the meditator parked
on his little cushion. Is he out giving blood? No. Is he busy working with
disaster victims? No. But let us examine his motivation. Why is he doing this?
His intention is to purge his own mind of anger, prejudice and ill-will. He is
actively engaged in the process of getting rid of greed, tension and
insensitivity. Those are the very items which obstruct his compassion for
others. Until they are gone, any good works that he does are likely to be just
an extension of his own ego and of no real help in the long run. Harm in the
name of help is one of the oldest games. The grand inquisitor of the Spanish
Inquisition spouts the loftiest of motives. The Salem witchcraft trials were
conducted for the public good. Examine the personal lives of advanced meditators
and you will often find them engaged in humanitarian service. You will seldom
find them as crusading missionaries who are willing to sacrifice certain
individuals for the sake of some pious idea. The fact is we are more selfish
than we know. The ego has a way of turning the loftiest activities into trash if
it is allowed free range. Through meditation we become aware of ourselves
exactly as we are, by waking up to the numerous subtle ways that we manifest our
own selfishness. Then we truly begin to be genuinely selfless. Cleansing
yourself of selfishness is not a selfish activity.

Misconception
#10

When you meditate, you sit around thinking lofty
thoughts

Wrong again. There are certain systems of contemplation in
which this sort of thing is done. But that is not Vipassana. Vipassana is the
practice of awareness. Awareness of whatever is there, be it supreme truth or
crummy trash. What is there is there. Of course, lofty aesthetic thoughts may
arise during your practice. They are certainly not to be avoided. Neither are
they to be sought. They are just pleasant side-effects. Vipassana is a simple
practice. It consists of experiencing your own life events directly, without
preference and without mental images pasted to them. Vipassana is seeing your
life unfold from moment to moment without biases. What comes up comes up. It is
very simple.

Misconception #11

A couple of weeks of
meditation and all my problems will go away

Sorry, meditation is not
a quick cure-all. You will start seeing changes right away, but really profound
effects are years down the line. That is just the way the universe is
constructed. Nothing worthwhile is achieved overnight. Meditation is tough in
some respects. It requires a long discipline and sometimes a painful process of
practice. At each sitting you gain some results, but those results are often
very subtle. They occur deep within the mind, only to manifest much later. and
if you are sitting there constantly looking for some huge instantaneous changes,
you will miss the subtle shifts altogether. You will get discouraged, give up
and swear that no such changes will ever occur. Patience is the key. Patience.
If you learn nothing else from meditation, you will learn patience. And that is
the most valuable lesson available.

(Source: Meditation in plain English by Ven. Henepola Gunaratana)