Winter Retreat – Morning Reflection, 8 Jan 2022
There is the nutriment for ignorance and the nutriment for true knowledge and liberation. Both are dependently arising on other factors. What arises, whether skillful or unskillful, is based on how one places attention, moderates attitudes, and relinquishes self-view. This is a transpersonal process – keep filtering experience in these transpersonal terms.
We come to Dhamma practice hoping for calm and quiet, but that may be down the track a while. Begin instead with dialogue, listening to the inner chatter with patience and steadiness. As agitated and troubling states are lovingly met, the passion around them fades. We can experience the nibbāna element here and now.
For the current three-month retreat this year, we have a lot of people who are quite new (less than five years’ experience) to meditation, and so I thought it would be good to go back to some basics. And of course in doing that, looked more fully into an area that I’d never adequately explored myself. The area is thought, or what I’m calling ‘contemplative thought’. For most people (I suppose) who enter Buddha-Dhamma through ‘meditation’ – i.e. sit up straight, close your eyes, focus on the breath – thinking is configured as a constant distraction, a mad monkey that one has to repeatedly drag down to the ground and tether. It’s either that or the restless parrot of obsessive thought; a presence that sits on your shoulder and chirps on and on while you’re trying to be quiet. Best kill these creatures altogether, and rely on the soundless angel of non-conceptual awareness to carry you to nibbāna, right? Well, that’s not the approach of the Buddha.
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