In meditation we elongate a vital pause; a pause where thoughts return to their superficial place in the background and a vital, spacious energy returns to the foreground. With practice you come to this freedom of not being controlled by your thoughts.
Real enjoyment comes when you forget about your own thought process for a moment; when you are not being pushed around by thought-reaction. Learning and developing this ability to pause refreshes and renews the way in which we see ourselves and the world.
Ideally meditation is spontaneous. It arises through your vital interest. This meditation has a quality of omnidirectionality. When you attach to a thought or opinion, your mind may become contracted. When your way is seen as “right,” it may become difficult to see that there are other possibilities. Pausing and letting go of such attachment allows the rigidity of thought to soften in such a way that it does no further harm, and we are no longer cut off from the present moment.
Meditation isn’t only the sitting posture. Sitting means to be mentally poised and to have the light of your mind be clear and not obstructed whether you are sitting or walking. It means to have the light of your mind turned back on itself, rather than chasing shadows and echoes. Whether sitting, standing, or moving, this is meditation. A hallmark of this meditation is to go beyond the limitation of your discriminating mind.
More and more we will experience that our mind is tranquil, yet still present and alert. Not the stillness of sleep, but the stillness of water which reflects clearly. You may discover that nothing is worth throwing that away for.
When you are having a difficult day – that is the time to practice. When you are busy – that is the time to practice. Developing the ability to practice under all circumstances is necessary to the subtle skill of meditation.
You can be your own sage. You can be your own teacher if you are a person for whom no task is worth losing the Way; when you see that no goal, no thing, nothing you are doing is really worth losing that calm center of awareness. If you become like a fly buzzing around or you become oppressed by the thoughts and feelings that naturally arise, meditation flies out the window. Where is your meditative mind when you are buzzing around? Practice is to keep returning to find it.
Meditation is becoming aware of this vital stillness and hearing within that stillness. It is naturally present before you become attached to thoughts and things; before you identify with thought-feeling-reaction. Hui-neng talked about turning your light inward. Turn the light of your consciousness inward instead of always running out after things. Practice means that everything you do, you act from Blue Sky Mind. You don’t run off with your delusions when they arise. Seeing them as clouds, you begin to understand that which stays and that which goes.
This Blue Sky Mind observes all of these passing conditions and sees them all clearly, but it isn’t any one of those states itself. If you are not careful, when these states arise, you either try to make them go away or you strive to make them stay. You become another cloud on the horizon fighting with the cloud in the sky. You actually believe that is who you are. You either escape or identify with each thought that arises.
Practice is based on another way. When your mind is still and infinite, there is no problem. When your mind is small and speedy and limited, there is a problem, or problems can arise. You are throwing away the big for the small.
Essentially, in the beginning you take it on faith that you are this Blue Sky Mind, this unstainable consciousness, Buddha nature. Through practice you develop the strength to not identify with the things that come up and begin to prefer the spaciousness of your unstainable consciousness. The more time you spend as Blue Sky, the less you will want to spend time as clouds. To the extent that you spend time in this birthless mind, in the mind that hasn’t taken the hard form of opinion, likes, and dislikes, to that extent you can have a flexible, expansive, and open mind.
You keep returning to Blue Sky Mind and as you spend more and more time there, eventually that becomes your place of residence. At this point it feels like a true turn-around has occurred, one with entirely different quality of being.
Anonymous Wayfarer, whereabouts unknown
Zen Master e’s comment
We are bound and attached to mind and the objects of mind
But when we sit deeply
When we nurture awareness
We become less and less enchanted with the small mind and its conjurings
Start to rest more and more deeply in the blue sky empty spaciousness of mind
That openness is nurtured by non-attachment
And that openness enables us to see all of our attachments
Then one by one, bit by bit, we put them all down
No longer grasping at what we want
Or warding off what we don’t want
We come to rest deeply in this very moment
This moment free from the tyranny of our thoughts
When we sit deeply
Just aware and still
The currents of mind subside
The walls and boundaries of mind dissolve
We discover an innate freedom that is not bound to any thing
Joy bubbles up of its own accord
Ease and openness become our new normal
Life just flows along on its own
Bound to a million different things
Conditioned by a million things
But we know we are boundless
When we sit deeply
We affirm that we are Buddha
And Buddha is nothing other than mind
And we see that the fundamental nature of mind is empty, tranquil, spacious and free
Then this deep sitting
Becomes deep walking
Becomes deep eating
Becomes deep living
Live deeply
And allow the fullness of life to flow
Let go of your grasping
Let go of your thoughts
Let go of your ideas and conceptualizations
Let go into the very empty spaciousness of who you truly are
Beyond name and form
You are a boundless Buddha