Here, Ajahn Sumedho explains meditation so well – in a beautifully straightforward manner – that nothing needs to be added. The words are, at the same time, both simple and profound. It is an overall explanation but also a practical guide. However, our habitual desire to fix ourselves and change our life circumstances make it more complicated than it needs to be. We seem afraid to believe that the goal we are seeking lies in simply relating to our life directly, without judgement, just as we find it, moment to moment. Can you – today – allow things to be what they are?
For many people the attitude towards meditation is one of always trying to change something, always trying to attain a particular state or recreate some kind of blissful experience remembered from the past, or of hoping to reach a certain state by practising. When we practise meditation with the idea of having to do something, however, then even the idea of practice ― even the word ‘meditation’ ― will bring up this idea that ‘if I’m in a bad mood, I should get rid of it’, or ‘if the mind is scattered and I’m all over the place, I should make it one-pointed’. In other words, we make meditation into hard work. So then there is a great deal of failure in it because we try to control everything through these ideas.
The goal of meditation is to see things as they are; it is a state of awakened attention. And this is a very simple thing. It isn’t complicated or difficult or something that takes years to achieve. It is so easy, in fact, that you don’t even notice it. When you think in terms of having to practise meditation, you are conceiving it as something you have to attain …….. you have to control your emotions, you have to develop virtues in order to attain some kind of ideal state of mind. You might have images of a lot of yogis sitting in remote places on mountain tops and in caves. ….. and it all sounds very remote and very far from what you can expect from your life as a human being. The point is to look at meditation as awakenedness and awareness throughout daily life in whatever way we live and in whatever conditions. There is in that the sense of allowing things to be in this present moment, allowing whatever way the body is or the emotional and mental states right now to be the way they are. Just be the observer of whatever is. Right now the mood is ‘this’, ‘I feel this’. Just be aware whether you are confused, indifferent, happy, sad, uncertain or whatever. Be that which allows things to be what they are.
Ajahn Sumedho
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