[A UserMember]

Hi Ivan, thanks for your thoughtfull response.

I do not mean to steamroll over anyone elses ideas or experiences. No sincere practice is pointless.

However the profound transformation that is possible does, usually, require taking time away from the normal incessant hubub we are so completely embedded in daily since birth, for decades on end. Its a huge change and almost impossible without removing ourselves and bringing some sincere dedication along. Even folks born into cultures that do not bestow the obstacles ours does consider retreat as routine necessity to progress into deeper practice.

Some folks are not expecting or even capable of conceptualizing the kind of transformation that is possible. That is normal too.

I never practiced more than 2 hours a day even in retreat. Retreats I attended (7 or so, 1 week long each) were routine periods of practice intespersed with dharma talks, Q and A. From that plus sincere daily home practice, up to, never more than, 2 hours a day …. my life was transformed beyone anything I was capable of imagining or hoping for. I did do serious mental emotional house cleaning before meeting a great teacher. For sure, that is why I progressed with relative ease.

Those bone rattling experiences are pretty much manditory as I understand it from the teacher I learned shamatha under. He was hand picked and taught directly by the Dalai Lama.

Those experiences are like the gargoyls flanking the gates to a temple … which are symbolic of this process of what one will encounter. That sequence is strongly present in the work of C.G. Jung also , in fact it is central. My experience was that they are immediate precusors to sustained deepening of more profound experiences.

Thanks again

Best regards
john

[A UserMember]

The breath (from my understanding) is simply a focal point for attention. Like a tool. The objective is to focus and stabilize your attention, eventually, totally. That is shamatha. It is so completely simple, yet not so easy to go into total focus and stability. It is so simple it can escape us, we tend to look for some complex head trip. Our minds are so extremely agitated and unstable here in industrialized cultures. We

The breath is a great object of select for focus of attention because as long as you are alive it will be there. That allows every other event occuring in your mind to be brought into into relief … as an interruption to quiescence. Then you can eventually, progressively become acutely aware of every event in your mind. That is the objective: to know your mind totally.

When the mind wanders from the focus of attention, that is mental aggitation. When you get sleepy, that is dullness. With aggitation the remedy is relax more deeply. With dullness the remedy is refresh your interest in the object. In all cases the remedy is to relax more deeply, progressively more and more relaxed.

The way I was trained, starting out, one spends entire sessions just becoming accustomed to relaxing progressively more and more. Then you start training attention on easy targets, begin to include like sensations of breath throughout the body. Then more narrow focus, perhaps sensatioins of breath in the belly, then the chest. Then at the tip of your nose. Soon the tip of the nose sensations take up the whole field of your awareness and they alone become this huge intensified experience that occupys all your ability to sense. Everything else in your experience recedes into the distant faint background.

If your mind is too wild and wooly to get into these things then psychotherapy, or the like, has accelerate clearing all the garbage out the is controling your mind, not permitting you to have control of it.

[A UserMember]

Hi Kurt,

I’m new on this board, and, I must start with saying I have not read Culadasas book “The Mind Illuminated” yet. So I hope my big emouth does not leave anyone feeling I’ve stepped on any toes.

I do have considerable experience with Shamatha practice and great good fortune with other teachers and experiences prior to instruction in Shamatha that prepared me benefit from the practice in a short period of time.

Regarding your comments:
“I’m not sure what stage I’m at in the book. Currently, I’m having two problems with my meditation sessions, and they seem to alternate. The most common problem is inescapable drowsiness.”

Forget what stage you are at. Focus 100% on leaning to know your mind , directly from experience, without the head trip of nailing down what stage you are at. Preoccupation with that is a a big obstacle.

For drowsiness: get better sleep. I had to rearrange my life in a wholesale way and get the best quality most restful sleep of my life before I was capable to reaping the fruits of Shamatha practice in a way that transformed my life. If you cannot or will not find that kind of commitment / dedication then settle for getting little from what you are doing.

another of your comments:
“My other problem, and this is usually not when I’m feeling drowsy, is that I am experiencing very strange sensations that are distracting.”

I am neither qualified nor authorized to teach but I can share my experiences based on 35 years or so of preparation for practice, then actual practice.

It is almost impossible to get anywhere in Shamatha practice without placing all the other parts of life into secondary priority for periods of time, as in a retreat. We westerners are plagued with wildly agitated and unstable minds. We are programmed that way from the first breath we take in industrialized culture. People born in Mongolia, Tibet or rural India do not have those problems. Most of us here in the west need “psychotherapy” first to get our mental agitation and instability down to a dull roar. Then we are prepared for retreat and then we can benefit from great instruction, if we are so lucky to find it. In my view great instruction is pretty rare. Even Tibetan born folks do not understand the kinds of obstacles we face as kookoo westerners, they never had to deal with those things themselves.

There will be a wide diversity of experiences from innocuous sensory and emotional phenomenom like you describe to things so bone rattling and terrifying you are convinced you are going insane. That type on intensity is from the fact Shamatha practice dredges up the rotting corpses from the mud of your psyche and you will have a close encounter with these things. That is how those things are purged from your consciousness when the practice is working …. so you can begin experience the exquisite quiescence and stability of samadhi.

Regards
John

[Author]

Posts