Class 7 教師稿

Today, we will review what we learned in stage 4, and explore how shamatha training supports direct insight into the nature of reality.

How all this work of developing the microscope through shamatha training leads us to have a focused, sharp, precise, and stabilized view to put the diamond of wisdom under. To touch the diamond world.

Who can tell me about stage 4 in the chat? What is the stage name? Goal? Obstacle? Antidotes to dullness?

Stillness and insight.

Shamatha is boring. Just breath week after week after week. It isn't virtuous, it doesn't lead anywhere…

We shouldn't think of shamatha like that! It is the foundation of everything. We absolutely must develop this state of mind if we want to touch the diamond world. There is no other path.

Shamatha is specifically the foundation for vipashyana. It is part of the definition of the state of vipashyana.

You get the foundation. The microscope, and then you aim the microscope at something.

Vipashyana is insight. Insight into the nature of reality. Emptiness.

So let's see how one can flow into the other… one way that breath meditation can flow into an insight meditation.

Let's investigate the idea that breath is not an actual object. It is not a discrete thing out there. It is simply an idea.

Get past the more gross ideas of inhale and exhale and really watch the sensation. Drop the labels.

Get down to the level of sensation that isn't attached to a story.

Feel that sensation that is moving there all the time.

Don't guide the experience or tell it what to be. Just watch. Observe.

How long is this sensation of inhale or exhale? Or, how long is this experience of sensation?

The real sensation of breath. How much time does it take? How much duration is there to this sensation?

It can't be two seconds because you can't experience two seconds in the now. The sensation you are experiencing now, in the present, can't last that long.

Most of it is already gone or has yet to come.

How much can you experience in a second? Half a second?

How much of this sensation can you experience in a moment? Most of this moment is also already gone. Some has yet to come.

Is there some impossibly small sliver you are experiencing in the now?

Anything that exists has to have duration, or how could you say it exists?

So anything you are experiencing, you must experience for some amount of time. And some of it is yet to come, and some has already been experienced and has gone to the past.

No matter how small a sliver of breath you try to find, it is ever-vanishing.

It is an ever-vanishingly small sliver of parts pasted together in your imagination. You glue together what is past, what is present, and what is future.

That sliver is an imaginary object that we try to concretize into a thing that we are experiencing.

You could never define that thing that you are experiencing in the present. You are pasting imaginary objects together and calling it a real thing. And you forget that you are the one doing it.

And so you have never felt your breath because there is no such thing as breath.

And so you have never felt your breath because there is no such thing as breath… other than your idea of breath.

Other than the mental image you have of breath.

You have a series of mental images of breath that you impossibly piece together and label "breath I am experiencing in the moment."

This is what breath is. It is all breath ever was. It is all breath will ever be.

These images come from seeds in your mind, created by whether you have cared for others in the past.

Your capacity to train your mind in this way — to develop shamatha — comes from seeds. It does not matter how well you understand Kamalashila. It doesn't matter how long you sit on your cushion. If you don't plant the seeds to have a calm, focused mind, no technique will ever work for you.

If you haven't planted the seeds, understanding how breath is a mental image, you will never understand how breath is not a thing out there.

You will never understand how it is that there is no such thing as breath, and yet it is the very thing that keeps you alive.

If we don't plant these seeds, we will never understand these higher truths. If we don't make it a way of life to expand our capacity to be kind, we will never see emptiness directly…

We will never sit next to the divine,

never feel the bliss of love,

never look into the eyes of truth… and see our beautiful reflection there, smiling back.

And if we do plant these seeds, we must.

How was your experience? Would anyone like to share what they noticed or felt during the meditation?

Homework — Daily sit + journal — Review class — Homework 7 — Share insights in the chat.

If you practice these instructions correctly, then you will gain the razor-sharp sword of wisdom, a form of one-pointed concentration where quietude and special insight (shamata and vipashyana) are married together. You can then carry this mighty sword onto the field of battle, and as time goes by smash the two great obstacles. That is, you can eliminate within you every undesirable quality. With this, you will win the great victory over negative thoughts and emotions, and find yourself able to fulfill the hopes of every living being, for as long as space itself endures.

Notes from Geshe Michael's teachers, taken from teachings on the Nine Stages of Meditation based on the great Master, Kamalashila.