Meditation — Finding Comfort and Ease in the Nature of Mind

What Is the Common Status During Meditation?

You need to note that the state in which your mind experiences clarity with no darkness left, also known as the luminous state, is not the highest state yet. As you progress to the next stage of meditative experience, while you are resting in your inner peace, you seem to experience the bliss that is free from suffering. You are quite comfortable with such experience. You may develop the desire to remain in such a state forever and become unwilling to leave your meditation. Although you can meditate in this way in the short run, it is still not the ultimate level yet.

What Do the Three Levels of Meditation Feel Like?

When you experience the three nyams, you can stabilize your mind in a state free of gross suffering and discursive thoughts. At this stage, you are practicing basic meditation of ordinary people. The next stage of practice is to rest in emptiness without any experience of the three nyams, i.e. bliss, clarity or absence of thoughts. The four experiences of bliss, clarity, absence of thoughts and emptiness can help subdue the discursive thoughts which are hard to control in daily life. However, if you want to maintain such spiritual achievement for a long time, you need to practice the advanced insight meditation (vipassana).

What Does Your Heart Feel Like When It Is in Peace?

When your mind is resting naturally, there is nothing in the world that can disturb you. Why this happens, and why can’t you abide in such a state? The mind is the source of everything, but what is the mind that you try to stabilize? Everyone here should do start looking inward, and get to know yourself first before trying to know your own mind.

Who on Earth “I” Am?

If I ask you who you are, or where you are, you will probably think of your physical body. But do you really know yourself? Think over carefully who on earth you actually are. You believe that you exist in this world. Of course, on the level of the conventional truth, Buddhism does not deny the existence of “I”. But if you examine carefully, the so-called “I” is hard to identify. Most of you reckon that “I” exists, because the body and mind make up “I”. However, when you examine the elements that make up the “I” individually, the so-called “I” cannot be identified anywhere within the elements. If there is no “I” in each of these elements, how can “I” exist within a combination of them?

How to Adjust the Negative Emotions?

Many negative emotions arise because we can’t control our mind. Such negative emotions are very harmful to our physical health. If we can fully understand our mind, which is always resting in its empty nature that is free from conceptualization, we will be able to transform unfavorable conditions into sources of inner strength quickly. Buddhists who have practiced meditation for years are used to converting adverse or unfair situations into factors of happiness.