The Art of Meditation (animated video)
What is meditation and how can we use meditation to alleviate our suffering and achieve peace of mind? It's probably a bit more complicated than most people think.
When we meditate, we watch our thoughts while focusing our attention on a certain anchor that keeps us in the present. For example, the breath. While watching the breath, we observe how our thoughts come and go along with our feelings and emotions. When we get dragged into them, we bring back our attention to our anchor. But this isn't the whole story. Meditation isn't just about watching our inner processes; it's a tool to transform and cultivate the mind.
Used in spiritual practices, as we see in Buddhism and Hinduism, cultivating the mind is like a gardening project. By meditating, we train ourselves to become aware of our inner garden so we can cultivate as well as protect it. This means that we prevent weeds from growing, eradicate the weeds that are already present, and replace them with beautiful plants and trees. A well-tended garden resembles a serene and joyful mind.
This video explores the art of meditation.
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When you investigate yourself, you'll find three things:
- That your thoughts, feelings, and emotions are impermanent.
- That there is no solid or fixed self.
- That we're mostly in a state of dissatisfaction.
This means that we're always looking for pleasure, running from pain, and that who we think we are and what we want is constantly shifting. Most of the time, we are pushed around by our environment that not only dictates what we should and shouldn't want but also strongly influences how we feel and what we think.
A mind that's subject to the whims of its surroundings is what the Buddhists call the monkey mind. The monkey mind is untrained, and as a consequence, it's in an ongoing pursuit of sensory pleasures, like a monkey swinging from branch to branch. Untrained minds are led by impulses; they're mirrors of the surrounding world. When we have such minds—and let's face it, most people do—we are in pain not so much because of the world itself but because we're ill-informed about the reality of existence.
For example, we think that sensory pleasure equals happiness while, in reality, this isn't the case. Or that we're somehow entitled to certain objects, experiences, or people, while in reality, we aren't. This causes destructive mental states like greed, hatred, and anger.
Let's imagine the mind as a garden in a city surrounded by a stone wall with one gate. There are six roads that lead into the city. These roads resemble the six sense doors: seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting, and ideas. All this information coming from our senses about the world around us must go through that one gate before it can enter the garden. Once it is inside, it will influence the quality of the garden.
However, it's not the sensory information itself that impacts our garden but our own perceptions, beliefs, and ideas regarding that information. If we are averse to certain people, for example, seeing them will be unpleasant. But if we are kind and accepting of these people, seeing them wouldn't be unpleasant at all and could even be a joyful experience. Thus, the garden is filled with sense perceptions and our thoughts about them. This interplay decides our mental state, which in turn influences how we behave in the world.
When the gate to the garden is defenseless and wide open, enemies can enter. These enemies come in the form of delusions that provoke feelings of hate or strong desires for certain sensory experiences—like trolls ruining a comment section or viruses affecting a computer. These delusions wreak havoc on the mind. They scream, "I need this, I hate that, it's not enough, I want something else," making the mind suffer an ongoing path of dissatisfaction. They are the bad weeds that not only need to be pulled out; they should be prevented from entering in the first place.
But how well the gate to the garden needs to be guarded! This is the job of the sentry. The beauty of our garden depends on the skillfulness of the sentry whose job it is to carefully select who can enter. Wholesome thoughts that are rational, wise, and truthful about reality may enter. Unwholesome thoughts that are irrational, unwise, and deceptive are considered the enemy and must stay outside.
The sentry can also reject sensory information, which doesn't mean that we, for example, close our eyes and cover our ears, but that we don't engage with what the senses pick up. Because unwise attention to external things—like overindulging in food or beauty, but also excessive engagement in ideas—damages our garden, just as over-watering will destroy a plant. The sentry symbolizes mindfulness. The ability to pay attention: only by paying attention can we discern friend from foe.
Unfortunately, in many cases, the sentry isn't well trained, and this is where meditation comes in. Meditation is a method to train the sentry so that instead of being a lazy, stupid deadbeat, he or she will be sharp and strong. A trained sentry has the wisdom to decide who is an enemy and who is a friend, prevents bad influences from entering our garden, and helps us to uproot the weeds that are already present.
When our gardens are well-tended, we'll experience peace, joy, and serenity as our minds are filled with wholesome thoughts and face the reality of life with clarity.
Thank you for watching.
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