Its the classic reason to start religious practice: some trouble in life. We think if we pay our debts to God or other people, say sorry, do some good deeds we will be forgiven and the bad things will go away.
Well in one sense of course this is true. We start behaving well, treating people with respect and clear our own hindrances and we will find life starts flowing more smoothly. (Fruits of Good Karma in eastern lingo)
But I'm realising there is something much more important. Suppose we have a bad feeling, or some anxiety or some other mental affliction and we start meditating to cope with it. We find we concentrate on our breath and eventually after days, months, years of practice we find that we can leave this behind and enter states of bliss where we are free from the suffering. It doesn't need be mental it can be anything, but mental is particular interesting for this realisation.
Commonly we are then disappointed as we leave meditation that the bad states are still there waiting in the shadows to grab us. But at least we have faith now that we know how to get away from them which is an amazing thing to realise. Whatever life throws at us, actually we are powerful to always escape it through meditation at the very least.
But there is something much more profound in this. Why does concentrating on the breath give us this power to leave unwholesome states behind and replace them with bliss?
Well if we analyse exactly what happens when we concentrate on the breath we have a clue.
So our teacher or book or perhaps our own intuition (I kind of did this sometimes as a kid) says watch the breath as it comes in and then goes out. Count this breaths to 10, not letting the mind wander. If it wanders go back to 1. When you get to 10 go back to 1. Keep doing until the mind becomes solidly focused on the breath... years later still doing this.
At first when I started meditating I couldn't tell whether I was experiencing the thought of "in breath" "out breath" versus the actual sensation. Then I got caught up in the whole "I am breathing in", "I am breathing out." In fact this is the sticking point for much of meditation. And this is the clue as to why meditation works.
If we have a bad feeling the key thing is that it is "my bad feeling." If you have a bad feeling I don't (unless I am a Bodhisattva) think to meditate to clear your bad feeling. The reason I meditate is not the bad feeling but that it is "mine."
And this is why meditation works because eventually we get beyond "my meditation", "my breath", "my bad feeling" even "my good feeling" and start to see just the meditation, the breath, the feeling. And this quite extraordinary transformation puts us "outside our self." We no longer look at everything through the lens of "mine" and just see it. It sounds like a flash of inspiration or really noticeable thing but of course such thinking is still "me" based. Suppose we do find the bliss of just seeing things and forgetting about our self being linked to them, the last thing we want to do is think "oh look I have attained the state of non-self" although this very likely will happen and we fall back into ego.
So its interesting that the very reason we want to meditate in many cases starts with the ignorance we actually wish to transcend. I want to get away from "my bad feeling" does happen in meditation, but this bliss comes not from losing the bad feeling, but rather getting away from the self that has grasped the feeling as its own. That same self will try and grasp the in-breath and the out-breath, and will grasp as my thoughts that it thinks so important that it will leave the breath to pursue some thought train. All the while grasping at things, and dividing the world into that which belongs to and is part of it and that which is not. So everything, every feeling, every thought, every sensation begins as strong "mine" and in the process of meditation we start to see through the mineness and towards just the thing as it is.
And when we get closer to the thing, and far from the mineness then we start the blisses. Plural as there are many.
But its common for the self to "mine " the blisses as well. Wow I have attained a bliss. Or wow my meditation is good. Or perhaps we fail and have no bliss and we "mine" that too so that our self owns the failure. Interesting to note that the meditator who escapes the self into bliss but then owns it for themselves "I am a great meditator" is actually in exactly the same place as the meditator who failed to get the blisses and then owns that "I am not a great meditator"! The meditator who fails, but does not own that is actually in a very good place!
And this is why meditation is "good for nothing." I'm still rubbish at this, and I still own my meditation. But really it is something we just do. There is no reason, it is not ours, we don't do it, we think nothing and just do it. It is beyond our explanation and that is its power to go beyond ourselves.
So all that is quite unusual in a world that demands we take ownership of ourselves, our reputations, our careers, skills, health. But its subtle cos you can do all these things without ownership just as you can have the in-breath that belongs to no one.
Commonly trying to get away from self we actually dump the things that are owned rather than the ownership itself. Once we step beyond the self and the ownership to see things as they are then we can abide calmly and peacefully in the world in bliss.
48. The Destroyer brings under his sway the person of distracted mind who, insatiate in sense desires, only plucks the flowers (of pleasure).
49. As a bee gathers honey from the flower without injuring its colour or fragrance, even so the sage goes on his alms-round in the village.
[Dhammapada Chapter 4, Flowers]
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