http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe1-4.html
Within the Judeo-Christian tradition we find two overlapping
practices called prayer and contemplation. Prayer is a direct
address to some spiritual entity. Contemplation in a prolonged
period of conscious thought about some specific topic, usually a
religious ideal or scriptural passage. From the standpoint of
mental culture, both of these activities are exercises in
concentration. The normal deluge of conscious thought is
restricted, and the mind is brought to one conscious area of
operation. The results are those you find in any concentrative
practice: deep calm, a physiological slowing of the metabolism and
a sense of peace and well-being.
Out of the Hindu tradition comes Yogic meditation, which is also
purely concentrative. The traditional basic exercises consist of
focusing the mind on a single object a stone, a candle flame, a
syllable or whatever, and not allowing it to wander. Having
acquired the basic skill, the Yogi proceeds to expand his practice
by taking on more complex objects of meditation chants, colorful
religious images, energy channels in the body and so forth. Still,
no matter how complex the object of meditation, the meditation
itself remains purely an exercise in concentration.
Within the Buddhist tradition, concentration is also highly valued.
But a new element is added and more highly stressed. That element
is awareness. All Buddhist meditation aims at the development of
awareness, using concentration as a tool. The
Buddhist tradition is very wide, however, and there are several
diverse routes to this goal. Zen meditation uses two separate
tacks. The first is the direct plunge into awareness by sheer force
of will. You sit down and you just sit, meaning that you toss out
of your mind everything except pure awareness of sitting. This
sounds very simple. It is not. A brief trial will demonstrate just
how difficult it really is. The second Zen approach used in the
Rinzai school is that of tricking the mind out of conscious thought
and into pure awareness. This is done by giving the student an
unsolvable riddle which he must solve anyway, and by placing him in
a horrendous training situation. Since he cannot flee from the pain
of the situation, he must flee into a pure experience of the
moment. There is nowhere else to go. Zen is tough. It is effective
for many people, but it is really tough.
Another stratagem, Tantric Buddhism, is nearly the reverse.
Conscious thought, at least the way we usually do it, is the
manifestation of ego, the you that you usually think that you are.
Conscious thought is tightly connected with self-concept. The
self-concept or ego is nothing more than a set of reactions and
mental images which are artificially pasted to the flowing process
of pure awareness. Tantra seeks to obtain pure awareness by
destroying this ego image. This is accomplished by a process of
visualization. The student is given a particular religious image to
meditate upon, for example, one of the deities from the Tantric
pantheon. He does this in so thorough a fashion that he becomes
that entity. He takes off his own identity and puts on another.
This takes a while, as you might imagine, but it works. During the
process, he is able to watch the way that the ego is constructed
and put in place. He comes to recognize the arbitrary nature of all
egos, including his own, and he escapes from bondage to the ego. He
is left in a state where he may have an ego if he so chooses,
either his own or whichever other he might wish, or he can do
without one. Result: pure awareness. Tantra is not exactly a game
of patty cake either.
Vipassana is the oldest of Buddhist meditation practices. The
method comes directly from the Sitipatthana Sutta, a discourse
attributed to Buddha himself. Vipassana is a direct and gradual
cultivation of mindfulness or awareness. It proceeds piece by piece
over a period of years. The student's attention is carefully
directed to an intense examination of certain aspects of his own
existence. The meditator is trained to notice more and more of his
own flowing life experience. Vipassana is a gentle technique. But
it also is very , very thorough. It is an ancient and codified
system of sensitivity training, a set of exercises dedicated to
becoming more and more receptive to your own life experience. It is
attentive listening, total seeing and careful testing. We learn to
smell acutely, to touch fully and really pay attention to what we
feel. We learn to listen to our own thoughts without being caught
up in them.
The object of Vipassana practice is to learn to pay attention. We
think we are doing this already, but that is an illusion. It comes
from the fact that we are paying so little attention to the ongoing
surge of our own life experiences that we might just as well be
asleep. We are simply not paying enough attention to notice that we
are not paying attention. It is another Catch-22.
