<Attaining Enlightenment Through Meditation>
(Questioner) Hi Sunim, thanks for giving me a chance to ask a question.
So, I have a question on meditation and studying Buddhist scripture.
I learned that the Buddha achieved a peaceful mind and profound enlightenment
through meditation.
I am trying to practice meditation for the same purpose,
but as a beginner who hasn't gone through the path, I have some doubts
about how I can achieve such a deep state of enlightenment through not thinking.
Could you explain how meditation can lead to such peace of mind and enlightenment?
(Sunim) All suffering actually happens because we think too much.
So, we need to truly liberate ourselves from our preconceptions of ethics,
morality, religious faith, and other paradigms. Those guard our thoughts.
For example, a man and a woman they like each other they have become lovers.
So, in a regular relationship between two ordinary people, you like each other.
However, if you are Buddhist clergy or Catholic clergy, you have been taught
not to engage in relationship with, in a sexual relationships.
So, those people who are trained in that way,
while they enjoy being with the other person in a romantic relationship,
also feel guilt.
So, all that guilt, that negative feeling, is not a result of having this romantic
relationship with another person you like.
It comes from your own preconceptions that you shouldn't be doing this.
So, a lot of the suffering and issues we experience today actually happen because of the contradiction or collision between what is happening in reality, what we experience in reality, and our preconceptions of how things should be.
That suffering disappears when you erase the contradiction of choosing abandoning a preconception and accepting reality or adhering to that preconception and foregoing your desires.
However, we can never solve this problem as long as we simultaneously adhere to a preconception and desire what we want in reality; that contradiction will persist.
So, another example:
so if there is some traditional ethics of morality that says men and women of certain age cannot see each other as romantic partners. Then if they do that creates suffering.
And if we are taught that once you are married, then you can never get a divorce. But if there are calls for you to actually separate or get a divorce. But since you're taught that you should not get a divorce once you are married, that creates a contradiction and thereby suffering.
But if you see in the natural course of things, you know, people come together and they separate all the time
it's all coming together. That's, it's not the cause of your suffering or separating or divorcing. It's not the cause of suffering.
It's your preconceptions of what ought to be that actually causes you suffering whether it's meeting for the first time or it's separating.
If you can just erase kind of the what ought to be, then you actually eliminate a lot of suffering from your own internal conflicts.
For example, when we teach our daughters that having sex before marriage is a sin so when they actually engage in sexual relationship with the person before marriage, then that causes a lot of internal suffering. But we don't the level we don't teach that as much to our boys as our sons as they grow up. So our sons can actually have sex before marriage but they don't feel the same level of guilt all because of the preconception that we have calculated in our children.
For example, if you can actually stop your thought right now, there's no cost to suffer.
So that's why the foundational piece of our meditation is to stop your thinking.
So what position you take however you breathe all that doesn't really matter
but a lot of you actually say you meditate but you end up quietly and think that's thinking not meditating
thinking good thoughts doesn't mean you are meditating. Well, meditation is a state of absence of thoughts.
If your thinking stops, most of your suffering goes away.
But once you try it, you'll know your thinking does not stop.
Naturally, your thinking is amplified by 23, 10 times more.
So when you're meditating, your bodies may be still but you're always thinking
because so how do we stop thinking? Because if you intend to stop thinking, it's that intention that also gets amplified.
That's why old teachers told us this
said there's dust flying all over the room. We don't see it too well. It's kind of invisible. But if there's a ray of sunlight that comes through that room, you suddenly realize that there's a lot of dust flowing around.
Then you take a piece of cloth or some duster and try to dust off the dust. Then you realize that actually you're creating more dust dan, what do we do? We just have to let it be
and then as time goes, a lot of dust will settle.
So basically what they're saying is that we carry around we're constantly living in a flux of thoughts, distractions and what thoughts but we don't realize we're living in this sea of distractions because we lack that single ray of light to actually eliminate that.
So the fact that you actually sit down and start realizing how dusty the room in your mind is it's not a failure in meditation it's actually a process of meditating that recognition.
It's the same thing as seeing that single ray of light actually illuminating all that dust.
You know, that first realization that I live in the midst of all this dust in this distraction thoughts
then you start engaging in kind of performance oriented meditation in what you want to do meditate better faster and thereby creating more distraction letting dust fly even more you have to just let it be
doesn't really settle that quickly does it because it just flies around that's why the strategy is to focus your thoughts on. One thing.
The easiest place to focus your thought on is your breath.
Basically it's a strategy of focusing on the inhalation and the exhalation of your breath
in Pali, it's called Annapana.
Another strategy that came up during the Zen Buddhist tradition is the cohen just focused on one single thought or one single question like who am I just focus on that single question
you know, other thoughts would constantly be there. You just let that be.
But the only thing that you actually direct your focus on is on that single question.
For example, say I read a book in the middle of the forest. I mean, you guys, you know, they're birds tweeting here the stream and you have cars. I can't really focus if the cars were not running, if the birds would stop tweeting, if the stream would stop running then I can actually focus in a quiet forest right?
But we can't stop those.
Just because you stop those externalities doesn't guarantee that you can focus.
So but if you really focused on the book and you get really into the substance of the book Dancing Birds may tweet but you don't pay attention to it. The cars may be running on the road next to it but you don't really pay attention nor do you pay attention to the stream actually running beside you because you're really focused you are in that zone of focus.
So meditation is all about the absence of thoughts but from a strategy perspective, it's all about focusing on that one single thought.
Let's say we focus on the breath in and breath out.
So when the breath comes in to know that the breath is coming in.
So you're not thinking about the breath coming in.
This is a kind of an experience of your sensation of the flow of the air as it actually travels over your skin, through your nostrils as it enters your lungs
and you also feel that kind of tactile sense of the breath leaf in your nose. So this is our thought. This is experiencing. You're just experiencing that breath. You might think of your mother at that time.
But once you actually get distracted by the thought of your mom, you start thinking, oh, what about the time we went on a picnic with my mom? What about the time we had an argument with her? So you actually create narratives around those stores and this becomes distraction.
So you can't really stop the thought of your mom kind of rising. But despite whatever thoughts come to you, you keep focusing on that but basically do not pay attention or energy to that thought. And then the thoughts kind of dissipate. Then other thoughts will come you'll think about but nevertheless you focus on their brain the thought of coffee dissipates.
So you'll have connous thoughts rise and fall, rise and fall as long as you don't pay attention to it.
But once if you start actually start doing it, when you think of coffee, you kind of follow it and create a story out of it. What kind of coffee do I want you? With whom do I want this coffe?
At that time you already lost that focus on that breath
because our attention can only focus on one thing at a time. If I focus on here, I lose focus there and if I pay attention there, I lose attention here.
Thoughts are just that as long as you don't pay attention to it, it'll just rise and fall, rise and fall.
So when we say we're distracted, those random thoughts are not distractions of themselves. It really becomes a source of distraction when you start creating stories around those thoughts.
So if you keep on practicing your time that you can sustain that focus on that single breath, it can be one minute before you're distracted, then five minutes and 10 minutes it'll actually increase.
So the attention span on that single breath is going to continue to increase and less dractions you'll experience less distraction.
Then you start actually gaining autonomy. You're no longer beholding your past memories or future hopes.
The reason you get angry, you get sad, you feel this emotion and that is because all these past memories come haunting you
and you become fearful and anxious and nervous because you're thinking about the future.
So if you're not captured by the thoughts of the future, then all your anxiety and nervousness goes away.
So that's why we teach to be awakened here and now without being captured by your past memories or the future that has not come yet.
So even if Buddha's a thought about Buddha comes unbidden to you or doing meditation, that's just another distraction.
So just singular focus on that breath everything else is a distress.
If it's a Zencen, anything that actually falls outside the scope of the exploration of that question is a distraction.
And so in that state, even what you read in the scriptures, sutras or even Buddha's own teachings, they're just distractions.
That's why there's teaching if you see a Buddha, if you think about the Buddha, kill the Buddha. If you encounter your teacher, kill the teacher.
So we don't really mean literally kill them but obviously what we are saying is that do not pay them any mind. They're just distractions. Sorry for the lengthy response. Thanks.