As a monk, I bring a strong commitment, along with the renunciate flavor, to the classic Buddhist teachings. I play with ideas, with humor and a current way of expressing the teachings, but I don't dilute them.
Sitting in a field of fifty to eighty people really starts my mind sparking. Since I don't prepare my talks ahead of time, I find myself listening to what I'm saying along with everyone else. This leaves a lot of room for the Dhamma to come up. Just having eighty people listening to me is enough to engage me, stimulate me, and create a nice flow of energy. The actual process of teaching evokes ideas that even I did not realize were being held somewhere in my mind.
Different teaching situations offer their own unique value. In retreat, you are able to build a cohesive and comprehensive body of the teachings. When people are not on retreat and come for one session, it opens a different window. They are more spontaneous and I'm given the chance to contact them in ways that are closer to their "daily-life mind." This brings up surprises and interesting opportunities for me to learn even more.
I'm continually struck by how important it is to establish a foundation of morality, commitment, and a sense of personal values for the Vipassana teachings to rest upon. Personal values have to be more than ideas. They have to actually work for us, to be genuinely felt in our lives. We can't bluff our way into insight. The investigative path is an intimate experience that empowers our individuality in a way that is not egocentric. Vipassana encourages transpersonal individuality rather than ego enhancement. It allow for a spacious authenticity to replace a defended personality.
Trust in the contemplative view and life simplifies by itself. Contemplation channels our ways of recognizing and knowing things so the awakening mind begins to cultivate wisdom. Then we can recognize why we experience suffering and put an end to it.
We were all born with the capacity to be aware – this is the reflective mind. It has to be cultivated or it becomes distorted. Mindfulness of body and breathing helps slow the mind down so it can reflect, recognize that experience is conditioned, arising dependent upon circumstance. When mind awakens to the way things actually are, one touches the deathless.
Thought is an abstraction – we step back from experience and form an idea, opinion, judgment. This Path steers away from thought, and inclines towards direct, felt experienced. Enter experience and work from within the doubt, confusion, aggression with a clear, pure Buddha mind, not the thinking mind. With this unification of mind there is the end of suffering.
The phrase “the way it is” offers a snapshot of the changing experience of the mind as it considers basic questions of existence. Meditation offers a way to be with body feelings and reveals the steady and tranquil energy there. Meditation also reveals the compelling and default practice of the mind that is always identifying a “self” which creates anxiety, nervousness, trying too hard and judgements. Seeing this default mind process we see the Buddha’s concept of “suffering” and this leads in turn to comfort and confidence with understanding the statement “the way it is”. We can recall the Buddha said that nibanna is in fact realizable here and now, in this life.
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