iMEDITATION

"Freedom is being happy to be where you are."-A Brahm

The mental layer carries guilt. The development of virtue and keeping the precepts help to clear this layer of all the guilt. Otherwise, all kinds of guilt will come up in meditation instead of gladness, joy, and inner happiness.

According to TRANSCENDENTAL Dependent Origination ( sequence of conditions leading to Awakening), freedom from remorse arises automatically in one who is virtuous. Gladness arises automatically in one who is free from remorse. Next in the sequence are Rapture ( piti), Tranquility (passaddhi), Inner Happiness ( sukha), Samadhi ( jhana), Wisdom, etc.

Effort To the Right Places: . It is important to apply effort in a balanced way, not too lax and not too tense. Setting aside enough time for personal meditation retreat everyday is very important. Usually, the mind just settles a little then our busy interaction stirs it up again. It then takes a while to settle, but before long it gets stirs up by interaction and activities. Setting time aside to be in silence and turning within allows the mind to settles. This makes it easier for stillness of mind to happens. However, your retreat routine needs to be put together in a way that is enjoyable. Otherwise, you will not stick to it.

" Emotional Pain is Optional"- Ajahn Brahm

Calming the Waves of Emotion In Daily Life

Meditation is suppressing the five hindrances, but what has mindfulness to do with the five hindrances? Another important thing is where you focus that mindfulness , where you direct it. Where do the five hindrances live? This is an important point not only to your harmony with friends and other people, but also to your progress in meditation. If you think the way to liberation is to put mindfulness on the objects of your senses or to put it on who's watching or what's watching, that will never get you anywhere.

When you put your mindfulness in the middle , then it's not what you are doing that matters but how you are relating to it . So put your mindfulness into the relationship that you have with the objects of mind in every moment. When you know where mindfulness should be put, the path of meditation , the path of Liberation, becomes very clear to you. You are looking directly at the hindrances; you are looking directly at the defilements.

By saying the observer is not a self or an essential me, and by putting that peace between the observer and the observed, there is no possibility for the hindrances to grow. The hindrances are suppressed by that means. By focusing my mindfulness there rather than whatever else. You're suppressing the hindrances. When the hindrances are suppressed, especially desire and ill will, the wanting, the doing, you also suppress all the other hindrances.

The emotion and suffering are at the point where you relate to the experience with an emotion ( the aggregate of feeling, mental formation and volition). And if we don't put mindfulness in its right place then we miss that. We think it's the retreat's fault, so we want to leave that monastery. Or we think it's our fault so we want to destroy ourselves or get into a guilt trip. This is wrong mindfulness; we're putting it in the wrong place. It's not the monastery's fault, and it's ot the fault of that person who is upsetting you. You are putting mindfulness in the wrong place if you put all your focus on the object and think that is the cause of suffering. We have to put the focus of our mindfulness on the space between the observer and the observed. That's where you find the play of greed and hatred, desires and aversions, wanting and disliking, and that's where you start to make something of this world which is no inherent in it.

Physical and mental factors of experience worked together to produce personal experience ( that gives the illusion of a self) and personal choice) . For example:

1. Form -As you walk in the garden, your eyes come into contact with a visible object.
I

2. Consciousness.- As your attention focuses on that visible object, your consciousness becomes aware of visible object as yet indeterminate

3. Perception( labeling, association,judgement, pre-conceived notions)

- the mind figures out what the object is.
Your aggregate of perception will identify that visible object as, let us say, a snake

V
4.Sensation/ Emotion ( Pleasant, Unpleasant, Neutral) .

Once that happens, you will respond to that visible object with the aggregate sensation/ feeling of displeasure, or more specifically that of fear.

5. Samskara- (Volition & Mental Formation)

* Mental Formation is a collection of impressions created by previous actions and the habit energy stored up from countless former lives, engraved conditioned response or tendencies. It is the subconscious layer of your mind.

* Volition is the action/ reaction . When VOLITION is mixed with MENTAL FORMATION, and influenced by FEELING, what you usually get is a conditioned response or a habitual action. As we know, habitual actions can sometimes be good for you, sometimes bad for you.

. - Finally, you will react to that visible object with the aggregate of mental formation or volition, with the intentional action of perhaps running away or perhaps picking up a stone.

Note: The khandhas of perception, feeling (pleasant, unpleasant, neutral) and samskaras (conditioned response, habitual action) is the space in which we must watch, according to Ajahn Brahm. Because these are the places where it becomes a personal experience that creates desire, aversion, ill-will, sloth and torpor, restlessness, doubts ( From form to conscious awareness of the object it has not becomes a personal experience yet) . Being witness or infusing mindfulness into this unconscious zone then this unconscious zone also rests.

In all our daily activities, we can see how all the five aggregates work together to produce personal experience.When the aggregates of consciousness, perception, Feeling, and Samsakara rest, all your samskaras disappear. They are burnt away, and you start witnessing , your awareness happen, and you realize everything is a dream, and you are unaffected by the dream.

Smiling

When there is inner chatter , emotion, or other hindrances arising in the mind as mentioned above , your face, head, and body is not particularly relaxed with all this mental activity. So just come back, relax your face with a serene and relax smile.

Cultivating a Peaceful Mind

Make Peace With Whatever You Are Experiencing

Freeing Yourself From The Constant Restless Inner Chatter In Daily Life

Contentment and Simplicity

Simplicity

From a very young age we are taught to perform and compete with others. As adults, we spend most of our time trying to keep up with friends and neighbors. There is a strong pressure to run in the rat race because those who are not running fast enough are looked down upon by their peers or people in our society. We are so busy running from morning to evening everyday that we hardly have the time to ask ourselves why are we always running, where are we headings as a society and what is happening to our world.

Happiness is a state of mind , that is still.

" Have you ever been happy in the future? Have you ever felt rich, loved, sad or angry in the future? Even if you feel happiness for something that might happen in the future, you always feel it in the now. You cannot feel in the future. You cannot experience in the future either. It is all done in the present. That is the only place where you can experience the beauty of life. Real happiness and joy can only be found in the present. Still we constantly try to create the best circumstances so that we can , one day, be happy in the future. And thus we are running after a moving train, a train we can never catch.
See yourself running behind that train, then stop and turn back, back to the present. Only when you have done that will you be able to see that the present already contains everything you need."

We may ask, " But what about working on our future or creating our future?"

We should do that. But that doesn't mean that we should allow worries to govern our lives. Only look at the future as an even better present for us to create. We can project for ourselves a new future, therefore we can create.

From Shaoni: Born From the Light

Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness

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