Once upon a time in meditation...

Dharma editor, Wisdom Quarterly, July 15, 2022

I would be as a doll, molded into shape, sitting perfectly still...with great hair (lol)

.

Clearing the heart/mind is good.

Once upon a time in meditation, not much happened. I'd heard of lightshows and fireworks, visions and past life memories, mystical powers and great cleansings.

I was making a common mistake: holding expectations. Therefore, rather than being mindful, I was actually being hopeful and full of mental clutter (random thoughts), distracted and defiled by a subtler form of craving, the zeal or eagerness to get rid of these defilements and the desire to attain purification and enlightenment.

Western meditation master Ajahn Sumedho, an early student of Ajahn Chah, makes this point, calling out the three kinds of desire.

Sure there is the "desire" most meditators recognize as harmful: lust, avaruce, sensual craving for pleasures and amusements through the five senses.

I was keeping clear of that one, aiming at a higher pleasure called piti ("joy"), a kind of bliss that happens naturally as a result of the mind cohering in meditative absorption or jhana, as explained by Tina Rasmussen.

Even that desire for attainment was getting in the way. There was no such thinking about what the hold up was, only the mildly desperate and increasingly frustrated wondering, How long this is going to take?

Hey, it's Reality come a knocking.

It'll take what it takes, and what that is depends a great deal on when I drop the craving, which is immediately standing in the way of success.

As Ajahn Sumedho deftly points out, sitting there with desire hoping for enlightenment or really wanting to improve myself by suppressing or eliminating my

• passion (desire, greed, craving, grasping, clinging),
• aversion (fear, hate, revulsion), and
• delusion (ignorance, wrong views)

will not work when I try to do it with a mind full of craving -- whether it's craving to be rid of the bad or craving to gain the good.

I noted the breath, brought my mind back to the object of meditation, and smiled. Exhale, let go, I told myself, and I realized it's not an act of will. Seeing harm in holding on works better because letting go seems like the only sane thing to do. How then to give up hopes and fears and continue sitting?

Bad, good, self, no-self, who would win?

Then I remembered something my enlightened teacher said, or I think he said: You can't do it. Let the technique do it. That is to say, just keep applying the technique (without all the hopes and fears of what will or will not happen or when) and, like everyone else, it'll happen by itself.

That's no fun! My ego wanted to do it. Ah. There's the problem. This will happen, and the ego will be diminished or eliminated, so ego's clinging on. "I" can't remove it, and every struggle I make reinforces it. So all there is to do is relax and carry on. Exhale.

[Carry on knowing that when the ego sees the Five Aggregates clung to as self, after samadhi/jhana, when the mind is applied to the fourth foundation of mindfulness, it'll let go all by itself.]