You’ve got two modes of meditation – millions of techniques, but two main ways you use your mind in what’s referred to as “meditation.”
The first mode of meditation is concentration – this is the fifth perfection on the bodhisattva path. It’s the achievement of calm abiding, shiné, shamatha – a level of samadhi, of concentration.
Then you’ve got the sixth perfection, which is the second mode of meditation known as “special insight,” okay, which means insight into emptiness.
“Insight” in general is a great word in English. Some other languages have got kind of weird words for this, but insight, it’s really good. You know, you say, “I had this problem, I thought it through, and then I got some insight into it.” What we mean is we got some inner experience of it. It’s a very nice word.
The first thing to recognize, to remember, the term “to meditate” in Tibetan is the word “gom.” I don’t speak Tibetan but I know that. And it literally translates as the verb “to familiarize”: to familiarize your mind with something, that’s all it means. So from that perspective the second mode of meditation, the gaining of insight, is the actual meaning of “meditate.” The getting of concentration is merely to prepare your mind to actually do that.
Of course, we have to get insight into all the topics, not just emptiness – insight into impermanence, insight into karma, insight into compassion, insight into all the topics, of course we do – to realize all of them. Of course there’s levels of that – first conceptual, then non-conceptual.
An ideal meditation session is one in which you use these two: concentration and special insight.
You go to your class with your lama: you listen to the teachings and you write them down, or if you’re a Tibetan you probably memorize them. And then your teacher basically says, “Well go home, Robina, go home Barbara, and I want you to do your homework: I want you to get insight into these words I’m just giving you.”
It’s very reasonable, it’s exactly the same as when you learned that 1 + 1 is 2, which is a concept within the body of knowledge called mathematics. Your teacher tells you that concept – you haven’t heard it before – and she wants you to first understand the concept and then get an experience of the truth of it: to get insight into it.
And what’s the method you’d use? You’d think it through. But first you’d focus your mind and get some concentration right? You’re there at your desk and when you’re steady you’d now look at your homework book – you’d written down the words “1 + 1 = 2.”
In order to get insight into this you’ve got to know what 1 means intellectually, you’ve got to know the concept of +, you’ve got to know the concept of =, you’ve got to know the concept of 2. It’s quite complicated. There’s a series of thoughts there, concepts: you’ve got to think about them first and get clear.
Then, with focus, you think it through – maybe you use your little blocks, maybe you write it down – and you do analysis of it. You do analysis: you think it through, you think through concepts.
You don’t just mindlessly repeat “1 + 1 is 2, 1 + 1 is 2, 1 + 1 is 2, 1 + 1 is 2,” waiting for the penny to drop. No! You use your noggin, you think it through. And then the more and more you familiarize yourself on your little seat with those thoughts, they go deeper and deeper and one day you go, “Oh, Mummy, I get it!” Now you have an experience of it. That’s insight!
Same here with emptiness. You’ve heard the teachings on dependent arising, let’s say – the “king of logics to prove emptiness,” as Lama Yeshe says, paraphrasing Lama Tzongkhapa. You go home, you sit on your cushion and you go to whatever level of concentration you’ve accomplished. It could be the first or the second of the nine levels they describe – most of us are not anywhere near even the first level, not anywhere near that, but okay, we do our best.
When you’re comfortable with your level of concentration, you’d now go to the second mode of meditation: You’d take the concepts, the theories about dependent arising, and then what you’d do is, utilizing the focus that you gained in your concentration meditation, you’d do what the Tibetans refer to as “analytical meditation.”
“Analytical meditation” is a fancy term – we get very confused. “Analytical” is a Greek term for the verb “to think about something.” That’s all it means – to think about, but clearly, intelligently.
You’ve got to realize that conceptuality can go to very subtle levels, and you want to use it, and, if you’re a yogi, you are brilliant at it: you’ve developed effortless levels of incredible focus and you can do what you like with it. You utilize the thoughts, the concepts, which then trigger the non-conceptual, direct insights.
You’re thinking it through, using the various teachings you’ve heard on dependent arising and then at some point, suddenly a little insight will come – a flash of, “Oh, I get it!”
What you do then is you stop the analysis and revert to the focus mode and concentrate on that insight. You hold the focus on the insight – it might last one second, or longer, and then, again, you go back to the analysis.
The deeper your concentration is, which you get in the first mode of meditation, the more powerful the insight will be in the second mode, because your mind is more subtle.
Gradually your analysis, your unpacking and unraveling of the misconceptions, gets more and more refined, more powerful, and your insights will become subtler and subtler and last longer and longer until eventually the penny drops and you have your first non-conceptual insight into the emptiness of the inherent self. You then perfect that by focusing single-pointedly on that emptiness – no thoughts, no appearances.
You keep practicing and practicing and practicing, ever more subtle, ever more subtle, ever more subtle, ever more subtle, until, in combination with your compassion-wing side, you then perfect the two and you become a buddha!
Something like that, okay?