Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

Mona sent me a note on meditation last night, from the fellow above and his book "Turning the Mind into and Ally". It seems like she always comes up with just the right things at just the right time. The third section is the critical one - it goes to the heart of a lot of material I have been seeing (and experiences I have been having) that relate to the grave error of mistaking our egocentric delusions with an honest perception of reality.

We can't possibly meditate without having first experienced the wildness of mind. We notice the movement of our mind " Oh, a thought". We're learning how to cut through discursiveness.

At every stage, shamatha is a practise of noticing how the mind vibrates. When the mental frequency is no longer vibrating with movement, we experience the naturally even and immovable quality of the mind, if only for a moment.

Believing that thought patterns are a solid self is the source of our bewilderment and suffering. Seeing through this simple misunderstanding is the beginning of enlightment.

Mindfulness and awareness presents us with the revolutionary opportunity to observe that movement without being swept into it.

---

Here is what Eckhart Tolle says about this mess (edited a bit by me)...



Another aspect of the emotional pain that is an intrinsic part of the egoic mind is a deep-seated sense of lack or incompleteness, of not being whole. In some people, this is concious, in others unconscious. If it is concious, it manifests as the unsettling and constant feeling of not being worthy or good enough. If it is unconcious, it will only be felt indirectly as an intense craving, wanting and needing. In either case, people will often enter into a compulsive pursuit of ego-gratification and things to identify with in order to fill this hole they feel within. So they strive after posessions, money, success, power, recognition, or a special relationship, basically so they can feel better about themselves. But even after they attain these things, they soon find that the hole is still there, that it is bottomless. Then they are really in trouble, because they cannot delude themselves anymore. Well, they can and do, but it gets more difficult.

As long as the egoic mind is running your life, you cannot truly be at ease....since the ego is a derived sense of self, it needs to identify with external things. It needs to be both defended and fed constantly. The most common ego identifications have to do with posessions, the work you do, social status and recognition,....

None of these is you.

Eckhart Tolle...from The Power of Now

---

I'm sure Eckhart would agree that in my case this is why I am so obsessed with the good house and good job - I derive so much of my identity of from these external artifacts. Well, neither of these is me.

And I'm sure Rinpoche would agree that this is one more good reason to find the gap in the silly stories that I repeat endlessly to myself about who and what I am.

Text © 2003-2004 Stanley J. Wolf