"The_Dalai_Lama_-_An_Open_Heart_-_Practicing_Compassion_in_Everyday_Life" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lama Dalai)

The Buddha you visualize should be neither too far away from you nor too close. About four feet directly in front of you, at the level of your eyebrows, is correct. The size of the image you visualize should be three or four inches high or smaller. It is helpful to visualize a small image, though quite bright, as if made of light. Visualizing a radiant image helps undermine the natural tendency toward mental torpor or sleepiness. On the other hand, you should also try to imagine this image as being fairly heavy. If the image of the Buddha is perceived to have some kind of weight to it, then the inclination toward mental restlessness can be averted.
Whatever object of meditation you choose, your single-pointed concentration must possess the qualities of stability and clarity. Stability is undermined by excitement, the scattered, distracted quality of mind that is one aspect of attachment. The mind is easily distracted by thoughts of desirable objects. Such thoughts keep us from developing the stable, settled quality necessary for us to abide truly and calmly on the object we have chosen. Clarity, on the other hand, is hindered more by mental laxity, what is sometimes called a sinking quality of mind.
Developing calm abiding demands that you devote yourself to the process utterly until you master it. A calm,
quiet environment is said to be essential, as is having supportive friends. You should put aside worldly preoccupations Ч family, business, or social involvements Ч and dedicate yourself exclusively to developing concentration. In the beginning, it is best to engage in many short meditation sessions throughout the course of the day. As many as ten to twenty sessions of between fifteen and twenty minutes each might be appropriate. As your concentration develops, you can extend the length of your sessions and diminish their frequency. You should sit in a formal meditative position, with your back straight. If you pursue your practice diligently, it is possible to attain calm abiding in as little as six months.
A meditator must learn to apply antidotes to hindrances as they occur. When the mind seems to be getting excited and begins to drift off toward some pleasant memory or pressing obligation, it must be caught and brought back to focus on its chosen object. Mindfulness, once again, is the tool for doing so. When you first begin to develop calm abiding, it is difficult to keep the mind placed on its object for more than a moment. By means of mindfulness you redirect the mind, returning it again and again to the object. Once the mind is focused on its object, it is with
mindfulness that it then remains placed there, without drifting off.
Introspection ensures that our focus remains stable and clear. By means of introspection we are able to catch the mind as it becomes excited or scattered. People who are very energetic and alert are sometimes not able to look you in the eye as they speak to you. They are constantly looking here and there. The scattered mind is a bit like that, unable to remain focused because of its excited condition. Introspection enables us to withdraw the mind a bit by focusing inward, thereby diminishing our mental excitement. This reestablishes the mind's stability.
Introspection also catches the mind as it becomes lax and lethargic, quickly bringing it back to the object at hand. This is generally a problem for those who are withdrawn by nature. Your meditation becomes too relaxed, lacking in vitality. Vigilant introspection enables you to lift up your mind with thoughts of a joyful nature, thereby increasing your mental clarity and acuity.
As you begin to cultivate calm abiding, it soon becomes apparent that maintaining your focus on the chosen object for even a short period of time is a great challenge. Don't be discouraged. We see this as a positive sign because you are
at last becoming aware of the extreme activity of your mind. By persevering in your practice and skillfully applying mindfulness and introspection, you become able to prolong the duration of your single-pointed concentration, the focus on the chosen object, while also maintaining alertness, the vitality and vibrancy of thought.
There are many sorts of objects, material and notional, that can be used to develop single-pointed concentration. You can cultivate calm abiding by taking consciousness itself as the focus of your meditation. However, it is not easy to have a clear concept of what consciousness is, as this understanding cannot come about from a merely verbal description. A true understanding of the nature of the mind must come from experience.
How should this understanding be cultivated? First, you must look carefully at your experience of thoughts and emotions, the way consciousness arises in you, the way your mind works. Most of the time we experience the mind or consciousness through our interactions with the external world Ч our memories and our future projections. Are you irritable in the morning? Dazed in the evening? Are you haunted by a failed relationship? Worried about a child's health? Put all this aside. The true nature of the
mind, a clear experience of our knowing, is obscured in our normal experience. When meditating on the mind, you must try to remain focused on the present moment. You must prevent recollections of past experiences from interfering with your reflections. The mind should not be directed back into the past, nor influenced by hopes or fears about the future. Once you prevent such thoughts from interfering with your focus, what is left is the interval between the recollections of past experiences and your anticipations and projections of the future. This interval is a vacuum. You must work at maintaining your focus on just this vacuum.
Initially, your experience of this interval space is only fleeting. However, as you continue to practice, you become able to prolong it. In doing so, you clear away the thoughts that obstruct the expression of the real nature of the mind. Gradually, pure knowing can shine through. With practice, that interval can get larger and larger, until it becomes possible for you to know what consciousness is. It is important to understand that the experience of this mental interval Ч consciousness emptied of all thought processes Ч is not some kind of blank mind. It is not what one experiences when in deep, dreamless sleep or when one has fainted.
At the beginning of your meditation you should say to yourself, "I will not allow my mind to be distracted by thoughts of the future, anticipations, hopes, or fears, nor will I let my mind stray toward memories of the past. I will remain focused on this present moment." Once you have cultivated such a will, you take that space between past and future as the object of meditation and simply maintain your awareness of it, free of any conceptual thought processes.
THE Two LEVELS OF MIND
Mind has two levels by nature. The first level is the clear experience of knowing just described. The second and ultimate nature of the mind is experienced with the realization of the absence of this mind's inherent existence. In order to develop single-pointed concentration on the ultimate nature of the mind, you initially take the first level of the mind Ч the clear experience of knowing Ч as the focus of meditation. Once that focus is achieved, you then contemplate the mind's lack of inherent existence. What then appears to the mind is actually the emptiness or lack of any intrinsic existence of the mind.
That is the first step. Then you take this emptiness as your object of concentration. This is a very difficult and challenging form of meditation. It is said that a practitioner of the highest caliber must first cultivate an understanding of emptiness and then, on the basis of this understanding, use emptiness itself as the object of meditation. However, it is helpful to have some quality of calm abiding to use as a tool in coming to understand emptiness on a deeper level.
CHAPTER 12
THE NINE STAGES OF CALM ABIDING MEDITATION
WHATEVER YOUR OBJECT of meditation, whether it be the nature of your mind or the image of the Buddha, you go through nine stages in the development of calm abiding.
THE FIRST STAGE
The first stage involves placing the mind on its object of concentration. This stage is called placement. At this stage you have difficulty remaining concentrated for more than a brief moment and feel that your mental distractions have increased. You often drift away from the object, sometimes forgetting it completely. You spend more time on other thoughts and have to devote great effort to bringing your mind back to the object.
THE SECOND STAGE
When you are able to increase the length of time that you remain focused on your chosen object to a few minutes, you have attained the second stage. This stage is called continual placement. Your periods of distraction are still greater than your periods of concentration, but you do experience fleeting moments of focused mental stillness.
THE THIRD STAGE
Eventually you become able to immediately catch your mind as it becomes distracted and reestablish its focus. This is the third stage of practice, re-placement.
THE FOURTH STAGE
By the fourth stage, called close placement, you have developed mindfulness to the extent that you do not lose focus of your object of concentration. However, this is when you become vulnerable to intervals of intense laxity and excite-
ment. The main antidote is the awareness that you are experiencing them. As you are able to apply antidotes to the more obvious manifestations of laxity and excitement, there is the danger of subtler forms of laxity arising.
THE FIFTH STAGE
The fifth stage is disciplining. In this stage introspection is used to identify subtle laxity and to apply its antidote. Again, the antidote is your awareness of this subtle laxity.
THE SIXTH STAGE
By the sixth stage, pacification, subtle laxity no loager arises. Emphasis is thus placed on applying the antidote to subtle excitement. Your introspection must be more powerful, as the obstacle is more subtle.
THE SEVENTH STAGE
When, through continual and concerted effort, you have managed to keep subtle forms of laxity and excitement from
arising, your mind does not need to be overly vigilant. The seventh stage, thorough pacification, has been attained.
THE EIGHTH STAGE
When, with some initial exertion, you can place your mind on its object and are able to remain focused without the slightest experience of laxity or excitement, you have attained the eighth stage. We call this single-pointed.
THE NINTH STAGE
The ninth stage, balanced placement, is attained when your mind remains placed on its object effortlessly, for as long as you wish. True calm abiding is achieved after attaining the ninth stage, by continuing to meditate with single-pointed concentration until you experience a blissful pliancy of body and mind.
It is important to maintain a skillful balance in your daily practice between the application of single-pointed concentration and analysis. If you focus too much on perfecting your single-pointed concentration, your analytic ability
may be undermined. On the other hand, if you are too concerned with analyzing, you may undermine your ability to cultivate steadiness, to remain focused for a prolonged period of time. You must work at finding an equilibrium between the application of calm abiding and analysis.
CHAPTER 13
WISDOM
WE ARE NOW acquainted with the technique to discipline our minds so that we can remain perfectly focused on an object of meditation. This ability becomes an essential tool in penetrating wisdom, particularly emptiness. Though I have touched upon emptiness throughout this book, let us now explore a little more deeply just what emptiness is.
THE SELF
We all have a clear sense of self, a sense of "I." We know who we are referring to when we think, "I am going to work," "I am coming home," or "I am hungry." Even animals have a notion of their identity, though they can't express it in words the way we can. When we try to identify and understand just what this "I" is, it becomes very difficult to pinpoint.
In ancient India many Hindu philosophers speculated that this self was independent of a person's mind and body. They felt that there had to be an entity that could provide continuity among the different stages of self, such as the self "when I was young" or "when I get old" and even the "me" in a past life and the "me" in a future life. As all these different selves are transient and impermanent, it was felt that there had to be some unitary and permanent self that possessed these different stages of life. This was the basis for positing a self that would be distinct from mind and body. They called this atman.
Actually, we all hold such a notion of self. If we examine how we perceive this sense of self, we consider it the core of our being. We don't experience it as some composite of arms, legs, head, and torso, but rather we think of it as the master of these parts. For example, I don't think of my arm as me, I think of it as my arm; and I think of my mind in the same way, as belonging to me. We come to recognize that we believe in a self-sufficient and independent "me" at the core of our being, possessing the parts that make us up.