So I’m sick of trying to locate the breath below my nostrils. My hay fever is bulldozing right over the Claritin, and besides, I think years of ineptitude with shaving have left the skin above my lips a barren, insensitive wasteland.
So I asked myself today, just wtf IS meditation? Well, I thought I’d try a different version, one that comes with a warning label: “for advanced meditators only!” Now, I’m no advanced meditator, but read the canonical description of shamatha without an object:
By completely abandoning thought and the object of thought
One should let the mind settle in the natural state of an infant.
Hey, I could do that! It sounds like how I spend most of my time (just ask Grant)! In fact, it sounds suspiciously like what I imagined meditation to be before I was disabused of the notion by such statements as this, written by Tibetan Buddhist adept and scholar Alan Wallace in his indispensable The Attention Revolution:
During the early 1970s, I knew of one fellow who decided on his own that the whole point of meditation was to stop thinking, and he diligently applied himself to this goal for days on end. Eventually, he reached this goal by becoming vegetative, unable even to feed himself, and he needed to be hospitalized.
Hmm… Then a few chapters later, we have quotes from Padmasambhava and Tsongkhapa, both founders of Tibetan Buddhist schools:
Vacantly direct your eyes into the space in front of you. See that thoughts pertaining to [everything] are completely cut off.
And
Resolve, “I will settle the mind without thinking about any object.”
So there you have it, folks. It’s all just a big hoax.
Just kidding. Luckily I have a few lamas here to help me sort it out.
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