One Flashcards
leaky bucket
If the skills and insights you learn on the cushion don’t infuse your daily life, progress will be quite slow. It’s like filling a leaky bucket.
“no-Self” becomes increasingly clear
All you’re really “doing” in meditation is forming and holding specific conscious intentions—nothing more.
simple the underlying process really is
intentions lead to mental actions, and repeated mental actions become mental habits.
Stage One
Put all your effort into forming and holding a conscious intention to sit down and meditate for a set period every day, and to practice diligently for the duration of the sit. When your intentions are clear and strong, the appropriate actions naturally follow, and you’ll find yourself regularly sitting down to meditate. If this doesn’t happen, instead of chastising yourself and trying to force yourself to practice, work on strengthening your motivation and intentions.
Stage Two
Willpower can’t prevent the mind from forgetting the breath. Nor can you force yourself to become aware that the mind is wandering. Instead, just hold the intention to appreciate the “aha” moment that recognizes mind-wandering, while gently but firmly redirecting attention back to the breath. Then, intend to engage with the breath as fully as possible without losing peripheral awareness. In time, the simple actions flowing from these three intentions will become mental habits. Periods of mind-wandering will become shorter, periods of attention to the breath will grow longer, and you’ll have achieved your goal.
Stage Three
Set your intention to invoke introspective attention frequently, before you’ve forgotten the breath or fallen asleep, and make corrections as soon as you notice distractions or dullness. Also, intend to sustain peripheral awareness while engaging with the breath as fully as possible. These three intentions and the actions they produce are simply elaborations of those from Stage Two. Once they become habits, you’ll rarely forget the breath.
Stages Four through Six
Set and hold the intention to be vigilant so that introspective awareness becomes continuous, and notice and immediately correct for dullness and distraction. These intentions will mature into the highly developed skills of stable attention and mindfulness. You overcome every type of dullness and distraction, achieving both exclusive, single-pointed attention and metacognitive introspective awareness.
Stage Seven
Everything becomes even simpler. With the conscious intention to continuously guard against dullness and distraction, the mind becomes completely accustomed to effortlessly sustaining attention and mindfulness.
Stages Eight through Ten
Your intention is simply to keep practicing, using skills that are now completely effortless. In Stage Eight, effortlessly sustained exclusive attention produces mental and physical pliancy, pleasure, and joy. In Stage Nine, simply abiding in the state of meditative joy causes profound tranquillity and equanimity to arise. In Stage Ten, just by continuing to practice regularly, the profound joy and happiness, tranquility, and equanimity you experience in meditation persists between meditation sessions, infusing your daily life as well.
Annoyance
Getting annoyed with every instance of mind wandering is like tearing up the garden to get rid of the weeds.
Forcing
Attempting to force your attention to remain stable is like trying to make a sapling grow by stretching it.
Physical
Chasing after physical pliancy is like prying open a bud to make it blossom
Mind
Care for the mind like a skilled gardener, and everything will flower and fruit in due time.
Attention vs. Awareness
whenever the term awareness is used, it refers to peripheral awareness. It never means attention.
Attention & Awareness
You work with attention and peripheral awareness to cultivate stable attention and mindfulness—the two main objectives of meditation.
