Slowly but surely I am adding days to a week, weeks to a month, and I find myself living in L.A. for almost 6 months already. In those months I was exposed to so many Dharma teachings from different teachers from totally different traditions, it is almost difficult to see that they are all Buddhist, scholar descendants of the same Siddhartha Gautama.
I thought it would be nice to summarize for this blog readers (myself included) and even more importantly share with my own experience with those teachings.
If I need to choose one important point to reflect upon, it would have to be the difference between concentration practice and open awareness practice.
While visiting Abhayagiri I was fortunate enough to arrive exactly while a famous Burmese monk was there – Pa ok sayadaw. I could not understand a word he was saying, but I did understand his practice, constantly and without pause keep your concentration on a point in mid-air, between the tip of your nose to the upper lip. Nothing else is needed and everything else is unskillful distractions. This should be practice for the attainment of Janna (first to fourth) and continue up to total purification of mind. Only then Vipassana can truly be practiced.
Of course that is different from all I have known, and was received with a lot of suspicion on my behalf. Keeping your focus only on that point and actively ignoring everything else seems at first as ignoring life, not knowing it at all! My suspicions were even stronger when I talked to the “local” monks who told me their own practice is much more like what I have known from “Tovana” – Look at the breath and open up your awareness from that point to all experiences, acquiring wisdom in honest and clear vision. But this was a worldly renowned teacher, and I thought I must try this practice, so I did.
It was very hard at start to keep your concentration on one boring point all the time. To not give in to my habits of paying attention to what comes up. It seems like life is passing you by and you just look the other way! But I kept trying and after only 2 days an experience came that change my whole perspective. There was this one moment of deep concentration, where my brain went blank and restarted again, washing away everything and leaving me with nothing, but not an empty nothing, a full nothing. A few symbols of light came into my point of concentration and I lost my concentration and that was it.
What was that?! I had no idea but it felt really good. From that point on I tried to go on with my concentration practice and had a few small experiences like the one I just told you about, And when I visited Watt Metta (Ajhan Jeff) I found out that this practice is also very close to what they are practicing most of their time – The breath as the source of wisdom, the breath as the ultimate object displaying everything.
I was sure I found the ultimate practice and that my path to enlightenment is set… But than I met a few lay teachers in L.A. that teach something completely different. A few day retreats about opening your awareness and your heart to everything did not convince me to go back to my former practice but a course on “The Ganges Mahamudra”, a famous text by Tilopa, the Indian yogi who is considered the founding father Kagyupa tradition (Tibetan Buddhism) did seed new doubts. The direct awareness and letting be of all experiences, that leads to complete and non-dual understanding, was overwhelming and left me in a way breathless. Suddenly there is no reason to look at the breath at all! There is no breath.
So what should one confused beginner like me do with all of these practices and traditions? Check them out first, get to know them, and then practice them for a while with a clear determination that this is your practice. Then you can choose something else or even combine a few. Always keep in mind, that there is no one path, no correct answer, the ultimate practice. But I do think that it is skillful to try and master your practice, keep it up without leaping from one to another every Monday. I know from Qi-gong practice that it takes 1000 hours to know your practice, and 10000 hours to master your practice. I don’t know if on meditation we can apply those same “rules” but it seems to me that before I know anything I would have to sit many more hours with concentration and direct awareness.
May all being find the practice fitting them and benefiting them.
Have a great year everybody
Dear dror
Great post! Thank you for sharing your experience and thoughts – they are ever so relevant for so many (myself for sure).
This was one of the lively discussions we had in the retreat last week. I managed a special retreat for scientists with simi, stephen, jacob raz (zen) and boaz amihai (tibetan). There was also a conference before the retreat and a dialogue at the last day of the retreat with Richard Davidson – a neuroscientist at the leading edge of brain research who is also a practitioner, a close friend of the Dalai Lama and a very inspiring being (look up his name in google videos). He also spoke of mastery taking 10000 hours of practice for anything including meditation.
About your point – I guess there is no right answer for it. Deep concentration practices can get you high and into very deep places in your being. The question of insight thus remains. You may miss the richness of experience in the ultimate level (this moment) and the close learning of witnessing mental processes that either lead to wholesome or unwholesome states.
In deep concentration you may easily experience what the buddha called “unworldly pleasant feelings” which means pleasant feeling that arise from renunciation rather than the senses. These could be maintained and enjoyable for a long strech of time (unlike great food, music or sex – try having them for ten hours straight!).
At the bottom line, these expereinces should not be clung to – only let be and let go.
At the same time – open awareness can also feel very very very good. It’s so pleasant and sweet to be radically open, accepting and to let life in. This should not be clung to just the same.
Maybe the point I am getting to is that I’m really happy for you that you are having deep, fundamental and pleasant states of mind in meditation and in life. You are experiencing more of the strength of the practice and it seems to be very empowering. So just know that even if LA sucks and cancer and away from home etc, we can still envy and delight in your dharma practice and wisdom and your sweetheartedness!!!!!
love love love
tomer