Investigation - Meditation

Investigation – Meditation      Ven Sumedho

In Buddhism there are two kinds of meditation - samatha [tranquillity] and vipassana [insight ].   

Samatha meditation is one of concentrating the mind on an object, rather than letting it wander off to other things. One chooses an object such as the sensation of breathing, and puts full attention on the sensations of the inhalation and exhalation. Eventually through this practice you begin to experience a calm mind and you become tranquil because you are cutting off all other impingements that come through the senses. Initially, watching your breath can seem terribly boring because the mind is restless and agitated and you are used to more exciting things. So, for this ability you have to arouse effort from your mind because the breath is not very interesting, not romantic, not adventurous or scintillating - it is just as it is, a natural process of the body. So, you have to arouse effort because you're not getting stimulated from outside.

In samatha meditation, you are not trying to create any image, but just concentrate on the ordinary feeling of the body as it is right now in the present: to sustain and hold your attention on your breathing. When you can do that, the breath becomes more and more refined, and you calm down...I know people who have prescribed samatha meditation for high blood pressure and hypertension because it calms the heart. So, this is tranquillity practice. You can choose different objects - movement of the feet, arms, hands etc. - to concentrate on, training yourself to sustain your attention until you absorb or become one with the object. You actually feel a sense of oneness with the object and this is what we call absorption.

The other practice is vipassana or insight meditation. With insight meditation you are opening the mind up to everything with calm attention.You are not choosing any particular object to concentrate on or absorb into, but watching in order to understand the way things are.

Now what we can see about the way things are, is that all sensory experience is impermanent. Everything you see, hear, smell, taste, touch, think and imagine; all mental conditions - your feelings, memories and thoughts - are changing conditions of the mind, which arise and pass away.

In vipassana, we take this characteristic of impermanence and change as a way of looking at all sensory experience that we can observe while sitting here.

This is not a philosophical attitude or a belief in a particular Buddhist theory: impermanence is to be insightfully known by opening the mind to watch, and being aware of the way things are.

It's not a matter of analysing things by assuming that things should be a certain way and, when they aren't, then try to figure out why things are not the way we think they should be. With insight practice, we are not trying to analyse ourselves or even trying to change anything to fit our desires. In this practice we just patiently observe that whatever arises passes away, whether it is mental or physical.

So this includes the sense organs themselves, the object of the senses, and the consciousness that arises with their contact. There are also mental conditions of liking and disliking what we see hear, smell, taste, feel or touch; the names we give them; and the ideas, words and concepts we create around sensory experience. Much of our life is based on wrong assumptions made through not understanding and not really investigating the way anything is. So life for one who isn't awake and aware tends to become depressing or bewildering, especially when disappointments or tragedies occur.

Then one becomes overwhelmed because one has not observed the way things are.

In Buddhist terms we use the word Dhamma, which means 'the way it is', 'the natural laws'. 

When we observe and 'practise the Dhamma', we open our mind to the way things are. In this way we are no longer blindly reacting to the sensory experience, but understanding it, and through that comprehension we begin to let go of it. We begin to free ourselves from just being overwhelmed or blinded and deluded by the appearance of things.

Now to be aware and awake is not a matter of becoming that way, but of being that way.

So we observe the way it is right now, rather than doing something now to become aware in the future. We observe the body as it is, sitting here. It all belongs to nature, doesn't it? The human body belongs to the earth, it needs to be sustained by the things that come out of the earth. You cannot live on just air or try to import food from Mars and Venus. You have to eat the things that live and grow on this Earth. When the body dies, it goes back to the earth, it rots and decays and becomes one with the earth again.It follows the laws of nature, of creation and destruction, of being born and then dying. Anything that is born doesn't stay permanently in one state, it grows up, gets old and then dies. All things in nature, even the universe itself, have their spans of existence, birth and death, beginning and ending.

All that we perceive and can conceive of is constant change; it is impermanent. So it can never permanently satisfy us.

In Dhamma practice, we also observe this unsatisfactoriness of sensory experience.

Now you note in your own life that when you expect to be satisfied from sensory objects or experiences you can only be temporary satisfied, gratified maybe, momentarily happy - and then it changes. This because there is no point in sensory consciousness that has a permanent quality or essence.

So the sense experience is always a changing one, and out of ignorance and not understanding, we tend to expect a lot from it. We tend to demand, hope and create all kinds of things, only to feel terribly disappointed, despairing, frustrated, sorrowful and frightened. Those very expectations and hope take us to despair, anguish, sorrow and grief, lamentation, old age, sickness and death.

Now this is a way of examining sensory consciousness. The mind can think in abstractions, can create all kinds of ideas and images, it can make things very refined or very coarse. There is whole gamut of possibilities from very refined states of blissful happiness and ecstasies to very coarse painful miseries: from Heaven to Hell, using more picturesque terminology.But there is no permanent Hell and no permanent Heaven, in fact no permanent state that can be perceived or conceived of. In our meditation, once we begin to realise the limitations, the unsatisfactoriness, the changing nature of all sensory experience, we also begin to realise it is not me or mine, it is 'anatta', not self.

So, realising this, we begin to free ourselves from identification with the sensory condition: Now this is done not through aversion to them, but through understanding them as they are. It is truth to be realised, not a belief.

Anatta or non-self is not a Buddhist belief but an actual realisation. 

Now if you don't spend any time in your life trying to investigate and understand it you will probably live your whole life on the assumption that you are your body. Even though you might at some moment think, "Oh, I am not my body", when you read some kind of inspired poetry or some new philosophical angle. You might think it is a good idea that one isn't the body, but haven’t really realised that.

Even though some people, intellectuals and so forth, will say, "We are not the body, the body is not self”, that is easy to say, but to really know that is something else. Through this practice of meditation, through the investigation and understanding of the way things are, we begin to free ourselves from attachment and clinging. When we no longer expect or demand, then of course we don't feel the resulting despair and sorrow and grief when we don't get what we want. So this is the goal - Nibbana, the realisation of non-grasping of any phenomenon that have a beginning and an ending. When we let go of this insidious and habitual attachment to what is born and dies, we begin to realise the Deathless, the Eternal.