Robina’s Blog
6 April, 2023
The Tibetan word for meditation is gom, which translates as “to familiarize,” or “to habituate.” In this sense, meditation is a psychological process of familiarizing, habituating, oneself with two things: that which is positive or virtuous and that which is true or real. Right now, according to Buddha, our minds are thoroughly habituated with the exact opposite: that which is negative or non-virtuous and that which is not true – all the nonsense made up by the ego, by attachment, anger, jealousy, pride and the rest, which causes us suffering, to experience life in a deluded, distorted, fearful way, and to harm others.
Our finding it hard to change from the negative to the positive shows what our minds are familiar with at the moment.
A person using Buddha’s methods is, essentially, attempting to develop their goodness and lessen the neuroses. Buddha has found from his own experience that love, wisdom, kindness, generosity, etc. are at the core of our being and, in fact, define us; and that the neuroses, which we assume are natural, in fact do not define us, are not innate, and thus can be removed.
Given this, we need to train our minds until we’ve rid them of the delusions and perfected the virtues: that’s buddhahood, the final outcome of this process of familiarization, meditation.
But our minds aren’t ready to accomplish this yet; they’re all over the place. There are two modes of formal meditation, the first is called calm abiding and the second is insight meditation.
Calm abiding – also the name of the result – is a method for concentrating the mind. The short-term benefits of even moderate success are enormous – in our efforts to not follow all the thoughts, we inevitably get to see more deeply and more clearly the contents of our mind in day-to-day life.
But the long-term goal of calm abiding is the point: the development of a very refined, focused level of awareness, bringing it to a degree of clarity that we don’t even posit as existing in the modern views of the mind. Even though the benefits of calm abiding are huge, it’s just the beginning: it’s preparing our mind to see more clearly.
According to Buddha, because our mind is full of misconceptions about reality – that things are permanent, whereas they’re impermanent; that things happen to us without cause from our side, whereas they happen according to our past actions; that the outside world is the source of my happiness and suffering, whereas my own mind is; that our own self and all other phenomena have an inherent nature, whereas they don’t; and so on – then we need to develop insight into how things actually are. Because these delusions, these misconceptions are so deep, so instinctive, we need to develop very refined concentration and thus a very refined level of mental ability to cut through them.
Having thoroughly studied and thought about the teachings, we take whatever topic we want to develop insight into – karma, emptiness, impermanence, how anger works, whatever – and analyze it, deconstruct it, arguing with ego’s deluded view. Put simply, we think about it. But when the mind has laser-like focus it’s infinitely more capable of doing the deconstructing, and the analysis will trigger an insight, which we then hold with our concentration.
In this way we gradually familiarize ourselves – develop insight into – the way things actually are, lessening our own suffering and, just naturally, increasing our contentment and confidence and compassion for others.