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Eye for an Eye : Ordering Chaos : Stop that Move Some thought will spin your head but spin thought very fast will stop at its center. Visualize a Dhamma wheel is spinning, you should try to spin it as fast as your mind can. The wheel will spin faster as you meditate deeper. Focus at the center of the wheel then let the wheel spin faster with your stopping thought. Let the wheel spin as if you are watching its entire kalpa of movement finishes in just a second. Let it spiral clockwise. When you find it hard to fight with your thought, then you should not force it too much to stop. You should find ways to control it in your order. |
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Being Watched, Watcher, Watching While you are watching your one-pointed meditating, it is very easy to place too much concentration into the thing being watched that you will lose frame of reference. Your memory and your thought may deceive you by placing serial of things after another thing that pulls your focus away from the original point back to the past or the future. Make sure that you are watcher who is watching the watched thing. Present moment is with you who are watching. Not just watching. Not just watched thing. |
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Samatha in Vipassana, Vipassana in Samatha I do not like discussion about the difference between samatha and vipassana. What you think and learn about vipassana may be mixed samatha. What you think and learn about samatha may be mixed vipassana. Samatha starts from slowness to stillness of mind and it makes your mind very strong. But stronger will be useless if you can not use this power. When you can meditate faster and longer, then you should make your mind very active during stillness. Why? Because the most weakness point of samatha is that samatha is too quiet and too peaceful to encounter with your monkey mind. When monkey starts to jump, it may be too late for you to see its jumping. Suppose you can catch the monkey then you may not think fast enough to fight back. You may not select tools wisely enough to deal with that situation. Walking meditation, dynamic meditation, and other eastern practice as QiGong help your mind be able to active during stillness. But in order to go beyond samatha into vipassana, you have to realize suffering, find cause of suffering, and use the right antidote to end that cause. Fast! Always practice samatha and vipassana together. Buddhist’s meditation needs sila, samadhi, and panna. If you are going to be angry in next 1 second then you should be able to end it faster than 1 second. |
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A Short Moment of Upacara Samadhi Upacara samadhi is a state before attaining the first jhana. Upacara samadhi is a state that vipassana can use full power of mind from samatha practice without losing concentration. We should try to practice samatha as deep as we can from 1 st to 8 th state and then reverse back from 8 th to 1 st state many times then back a little to this state of upacara samadhi. When your samatha is fast and strong, you can utilize full power of mind at this upacara samadhi in destroying kilesa (craving). Big and heavy enemy will consume your mind power very fast in vipassana. When mind power is low then you should practice samatha as deep as you can again to refill mind power. So this is how the process works: samatha then vipassana then samatha then vipassana then samatha then vipassana then samatha then vipassana then samatha then vipassana then ….. This process works so fast that you will feel samatha and vipassana is one. |
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Meditator who believes he can NOT Meditate Meditator who is going to progress in meditating may stop practice because he thinks that he can not meditate. He found that the more he practices meditation, the more he thinks and there are lots of thoughts in his head. He does not know that actually this is a very good sign of progress. A person who never meditates will never aware of what is going on in his head. Mind moves too fast for his awareness to recognize its nature. Mind plays like a monkey. Only a faster mind can catch this monkey but the mind has to be able to watch all movements of this monkey before catching or stopping it. When you know what is going on during you are in meditative state, you should intelligently manage your thought. Check and use sila (precepts) and panna (wisdom) to get rid of unwanted thoughts in your head. This is a process of vipassana. All phenomenon in your mind is the effects that have causes. You may select to just watching it. But vipassana should go beyond that stream. After you can realize that stream, you should try to stop that stream then move it against its flow intelligently. |
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