Geshe la's Teaching: Sunday 6 April 2008
Geshe la began his instruction today with a quick take on meditation, correcting the popular misconception that meditation concerns a condition of mental blankness or no-thought. Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth. Meditation concerns mindfulness, awareness, and cautiousness, all mental qualities that lead to balance and focus. Geshe la also spoke of watching the breath, both as an introduction to the tantric practice of becoming aware of our "prana," or the life-giving force whose gross-level expression is the coming and going of our breath, and more simply to the focusing practice of following the breath. In fact, in the Anapanasati Sutra, Buddha says simply,
The meditator having gone to the forest, to the shade of a tree, or to an empty building, sits down with legs folded crosswise, body held erect, and setting mindfulness to the fore. Always mindful, one breathes in; mindful, one breathes out.
Following the breath, in and out, watching our thoughts come and go without attaching to them, following our breath again, we begin to approach meditative equipoise.
Geshe spoke at length about the five aggregates. To refresh your memory on this important concept, click here. In connection with the five aggregates, Geshe la also spoke of "preceding moments of consciousness" to introduce two ideas.
- A preceding moment of consciousness causes or gives rise to the current moment, and the point is that the cause disintegrates as its effect arises. Therefore, a cause and its effect cannot exist simultaneously. But more importantly, anger, or whatever emotion we are dealing with, will ultimately disintegrate, just as its cause did. We need only use our meditative equipoise to allow it to disappear more quickly than it might otherwise have disappeared.
- Substantial causes of the mind must derive from preceding moments of mind. This is important if you are to make a credible case for rebirth. Why? Because if the mental continuum depends upon a physical component, then when the physical component--the brain, the heart--deteriorates, so too does the mental continuum. For rebirth to be a functional idea, it must deploy a notion of mind that is ultimately independent of the physical reality for its survival.
So the point is really that understanding that these moments of mind arise from previous, deteriorating moments of mind gives us a great deal of freedom because it allows us to craft our daily lives by carefully tending to the current moment, and realizing that we are bound only by habitual modes of thinking. Geshe la mentioned that to be able ultimately to perceive emptiness and impermanence, we must develop extraordinary faculties through our meditative practice. And so we work on that daily, and we gradually begin to break these debilitating habits that give rise to what Geshe la call our "misconeptual thoughts."
But it helps to be familiar with some of the fundamental operating procedures of the mind that we are trying to tame, and understanding these preceding moments of consciousness, and how they give rise to our present and impermanent reality, and how we can gradually take charge of them, is central among those.
Sidney Burris, Tibetan Cultural Institute of Arkansas
