Oct 14 1990
We are going to deal more with meditation rather than teachings. So we can find our own experience. The most important thing in meditation to gain a greater realization of your own mind because that is what creates your experience. Everything you experience is created from your mind, not from the outside. When you feel capable, you can handle very difficult situations. When you feel incapable, then even very small things can make you fly off the handle. You can not give away responsibility for you experiences to others, blaming others for your unhappiness. You have to accept responsibility for how you experience reality. This is very important in Buddhism because then you take control of your own existence.
To do this it is important to gain a deeper at one ment with the nature of yourself, with your true nature versus the particular manifestation of your personality at this time in space. We are an entity which is always changing. If we gain deeper realizations of our nature, then we become a deeper person rather than live on the flights of our personality. Because when our personality is well, we feel wonderful and when our personality is not feeling well, we get depressed. That is very superficial.
We should try to gain a deeper experience which gives a deeper basis for our experience of reality. To do that the technique is to create a state of conscious awareness in your meditation which is open and allows the various thought forms you create to arise and go through without being clung to. That you allow them to function with an open state of awareness. If you cultivate that you will gain powerful realizations in being able to let go of negativity and allow yourself to grow beyond a particular personality.
To cultivate that deeper state of awareness is to use the analogies, being open like space, to be clear like the sky, solid like a mountain, deep like an ocean so there is more stable energy there. That is the principle object of this evening's meditation.
The objective is to find the deeper sense of self. To say, I am all I've got. Sure you have your loved ones, but all you really have is who and what you are. It is important to then have something which is nice. I would like to to be able to learn how to cultivate the sense of awareness of what you are on a deeper level than the relative consciousness which identifies with your age, sex, weight, capacity, position. Those are in our life but are temporal and relative changes in the matrix of life. We need a deeper sense of self. An awareness of what we are, and closer to the pure mind that we have, our Buddha nature.
The analogies best for that are open like space. Your consciousness is like the space before you. It should be very open. Thoughts are allowed to go through. In the scheme of things, it is very relative. Do not cling to it. Identify them as relative, they are relative in the sense of they were based on what you were like five to ten years ago compared to now! Does that mean you should get depressed about that! If we develop a deeper level of being we have a more youthful experience of life rather than being caught up with our vanities.
Another analogy used is brilliant like the sun in a cloudless sky. As it is not that you should think of being like the sun, but brilliant like the clear blue sky. Very clear and lucid. That lucidity is actually a fundamental nature of your consciousness when you develop a stable concentration you will experience your mind as that, lucid and clear.
The analogy of being solid like a mountain is to try to be grounded. Deep like an ocean in not to let the emotions completely throw you around. Try to be deep in the ocean so although there may be currents, they do not make you loose your balance.
Meditation:

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