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dhamma tips



Dhamma Tips

  Meditations Tips, Tricks, and Traps
   

 

 
 

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After closing your eyes

"Half close your eyes to focus and turn conventional into pure truth."

What we see may be seen too much, too complicated, and too complex. Although it is simple but our mind makes it differed. We change simple symbol into human language so we need to reverse it back into just simply normal mind language.

Mind language is clear, short, and easy to understand. You will know what you know. I will know what I know. Although we can not explain what we know but we do understand and know what we know.

Close your eyes then open another eye.


   

 


Many Questions, Few Answers

Although beginners may have many questions about meditation but only few answers will be understood. Although answers are explained in pages but they mean less or nothing to solve beginners’ questions.

“When you want to get Dhamma, you have to cultivate or make Dhamma by yourself.” Although this is an old fashion teaching but it works.

Teacher and book are only a guide that you have to learn how to stand up, walk, and then run by yourself. You will know the answer when your timing is come. No sooner or later. You may have different answers from the same old question. This explains how Dhamma is developed from crudeness to refiner so each practitioner will know his or her level when the answer has been replied.


   

 


Echo from Your Memory

Very often when we are counting the breath or reciting a word such as “Buddho” along with inhaling and exhaling, we lose our focus from the movement of breathing to the echo from our memory. Our mind always plays this trick to meditators who never notice what they are actually watching during meditating.

Although fake or real phenomena does not matter in watching but we should have full awareness at what we are watching. If you are counting the breath, you should know how you know you are breathing. Someone knows breathing from the movement up and down of the abdomen. Someone knows from the feeling resulted from the air contacting inside the nostril. Be careful when your memory replay this watching to you without your really watching.

5 aggregates must be utilized equally and balance. We begin from the simple movement of our body to catch the mind.


   

 


Make it Easier

When you feel you have not progressed, you should look back and analyze how you are meditating. Especially technique from books or general teaching that is available for all people, you should try to personalize meditation technique to fit your problems and needs. Do not mix many kinds of watching. Do not strict to only one method forever but you must keep on practicing on one technique at a time until you know next step to continue. You should devise your own antidote at each situation such as:

A. When you can not meditate because you always think about the picture of your lover/enemy. You should visualize a simple object to be concentrated on such as a picture of clear white light, a picture of red/green/yellow plate, a picture of clear crystal ball, or a picture of the Buddha statue.

B. When you can not meditate because you always think about talking with someone. You should recite mantra.

C. When you can not meditate because you always think about going somewhere outside. You should bring your mind inward by watching with or without counting the breath.

D. When you can not meditate because you always think about many things. You should add A+B+C techniques together then leave them as soon as you can concentrate.

E. When you can not meditate because you can not concentrate. You should take that time to contemplate on the Buddha’s teachings and find out how to detach from your attachment that is disturbing you.


   

 


Total Joyful Trap

There are lots of traps that you will love to be in these traps in meditating. Meditating is like a big rock that press down all your worries, suffering, and attachments for only a moment. Someone may feel blissful and joyful and would like to experience these feeling again and again and stay in it forever. This is not the final path because there are still many battles waiting for you to lead ahead. To fight with your own enemy that is the cause of suffering.

Please try to meditate more and more until you get accustom to this phenomenon of blissful and joyful as normal thing in meditating. Practice until you are fast in stopping the mind or be able to run your awareness as fast as the movement of mind. Go beyond this simple phenomenon into deeper meditative states. If you see the light while meditating then you should focus into the center of the light to see brighter light. Focus deeper into the center of the center of whatever emerging. Make your mind power sharper and stronger. Whatever emerging has its own cause, so there is always a reason why you see or know it during meditating. Contemplate on it then search the cause to end all its causes and effects.


 

Last updated
01-08-1999

 

 

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