Why We Should Meditate

 So the question is why should we meditate? What is the importance of meditation? Why is it emphasized so much in the Buddha's teaching? So these are some of the questions that I'm going to explore in my talk.

The word meditation comes from the Pali word Bhavana which means cultivating the mind, developing the mind, mental culture. So the whole emphasis is on the mind. When you read the Buddhist text, you are so amazed about the Buddha's profound and deep statement about the human mind. It is amazing that he should have made this statement 2,600 years ago. In fact, modern psychologists, psychotherapists are also deeply inspired by the Buddha's statement on the human mind.

Meditation: Knowing the Mind, Shaping the Mind, Freeing the Mind

The idea of meditation has been expressed by a writer in these terms: knowing the mind, shaping the mind and freeing the mind. I like to repeat the words : Meditation is knowing the mind, shaping the mind and freeing the mind. So knowing the mind is understanding how the mind is working. If we do not know our mind, really we are like machines. So therefore it is extremely important to know, to understand, how our mind works and when we know our mind, then we can shape the mind. Shaping the mind is developing mastery over our mind and if we do not develop mastery over our mind, what happens is we become slaves to our own mind. So when we become slaves to our mind, then thoughts and emotions control us and that results in more and more suffering. Therefore it is very important to learn to shape the mind and when you learn to shape the mind, then you can achieve a mind that is free. So the importance of meditation is learning to achieve a mind that is free, a mind that is happy, a mind that is peaceful, a mind that has loving kindness.

Achieving a Completely Healthy Mind

It is interesting the things we do to keep our body healthy. We feed our body, we keep the body clean, when the body becomes sick, we go to the doctor and get medicine to cure the illnesses. We do so many things to keep the body healthy. An interesting question is what do we do to keep our mind healthy? Have you given thoughts to this very important question? We have to be clear about what makes our mind sick, what makes our mind unhealthy. What are the symptoms of the human sicknesses of the mind? So meditation is learning from them and achieving a mind that is completely healthy. Some areas where the mind becomes sick, we can consider some emotions as contributing to the illnesses of the human mind. I like to mention some of these emotions and I'm sure everyone here can relate to them. Anxiety, stress, fear, insecurity, sadness. I can draw up a long list which I think, as I have said, we all can relate to. Sometimes we don't realize that they make our mind sick. If we do not know that they can create our sickness, we can continue to have that sickness without finding a solution to the sickness. In one of my talks, I will be speaking about emotions and I will present to you how meditation helps us to work with emotions. When I speak about emotions, I will be interested to hear from you what emotions really bother you in this country. So I will be presenting some practical ways of working with these unpleasant emotions and then finding a way to be free from these emotions.

Taste & Experience Buddhism

Another very important aspect of meditation is that meditation helps us to experience things that arise. There are some who know very well what the Buddha taught, so they are very knowledgeable about Buddhism but they have not experienced anything from Buddhism because they have not meditated. They are like some people who know about meals but they have hardly tasted the food from the meals. So meditation helps us to taste it and when you have tasted it, you achieve a kind of taste for the freedom of the mind. And when you taste it, you really see for yourself how we can free ourselves.

Become Completely Self-Reliant

Related to this is another point, that meditation helps us to become completely self reliant. When you meditate you realize that we have to take responsibility for what is happening in our mind. Sometimes I define meditation with my own words as finding the medicine for the sickness we have created ourselves. So as we create the sickness ourselves, we have to find the medicine. When you are sick, if you want to heal yourself, you cannot tell the others to take the medicine. Buddha emphasized this point very much: to be self reliant, to rely on own efforts. The Buddha said: self effort is the best effort. And when we develop self effort, when we become self reliant, then what happens is we learn to become completely self confident about ourselves. When we have this self confidence and then when we see for ourselves that the medicine is helping, then that gives us more confidence in the medicine and it also helps us to develop faith, confidence in the person who discovered the medicine.

So in my talk so far I have been telling you some benefits, some aspects of meditation. And I have been trying to tell you the importance of meditation. I have been trying to answer the question : why we should meditate. So now I like to pause and then if there are any questions about what I have been saying about meditation, we can discuss them. So please ask questions. When I try to teach meditation to children, I tell them sometimes that meditation is asking questions and finding the answers ourselves. Asking questions like: "Why do we get angry? How is stress created?" So to raise such questions and to find an answer, meditation can be seen as trial and error so therefore I would like that you ask some questions and then we might try to find the answers ourselves.

Audience: When we do the meditation and after that, I would sleep. When I fall asleep, I found some vibration in my head, just like someone hit my head but it doesn't hit. What happened? Why does it happen?

Godwin: When we meditate, many things happen in our mind and body, sometimes very very unusual and strange. So what is important, what we are learning in meditation is : whatever is happening in our mind and body, just to know it is happening. And also learning to accept them, learning not to react to them. There are different stages in meditation so you may be experiencing certain stages. Sometimes finding a reason may not necessarily be helpful but rather, as I often say, to learn to make friends with them and to see them as learning experiences and also not to see them as problems and difficulties. So what I like to suggest is, whatever happens when you are meditating, that can be an unpleasant experience sometimes but just to know it, it's just a sensation and just to say OK to it, make friends with it and then it will pass. So I like you to continue and maybe on Sunday we have a day's programme and we can see whether it will happen or not.

The Gentle Way of Buddhist Meditation

Dhamma Talks by Godwin Samararatne

Hongkong, 1997