Buddhist Meditation
If the basis of Christianity is God, the basis of Buddhism is mind. From the Buddhist viewpoint, mind or consciousness is the core of our existence. Pleasure and pain, good and evil, time and space, life and death have no meaning to us apart from our awareness of them or thoughts about them. Whether God exists or does not exist, whether existence is primarily spiritual or primarily material, whether we live for a few decades or live forever — all these matters are, in the Buddhist view, secondary to the one empirical fact of which we do have certainty: the existence of conscious experience as it proceeds through the course of daily living.
-- Buddhist Meditation and Depth Psychology
Goals of Meditation
Nibbana and an end of suffering are the primary goals of meditation and the realization of positive feelings is a secondary goal. There are also several tertiary goals which must be achieved before the higher ones can be fully realized. These are non-attachment, insight, and concentration.
Non-attachment is freedom from craving and freedom from infatuation for sensual experience. It is not a state of chronic apathy nor a denial of sense perception existence. Rather it is psychological liberation from our "enslaving passions and our addictions to sensual and emotional pleasures." Thus non-attachment is akin to freedom, equanimity, and serenity.
Insight is a word with two meanings both of which are sought in Buddhist meditation. In its classical Buddhist usage insight (vipassana) means full awareness of the three characteristics of existence, i.e., impermanence, suffering (dukkha), and impersonality. Otherwise stated, this means full realization of the fact that all things in the universe are temporary and changing; the human psyche is no exception and thus is not an immortal soul; and as a consequence suffering is always inevitable, for no state of mind, pleasant or unpleasant, can endure forever.
In its psychiatric usage insight means gaining awareness of those feelings, motives, and values which have previously been unconscious. Repressed feelings of guilt, fear, lust, and hatred may lurk in the hidden recesses of our minds and unconsciously shape our lives until such time as they are brought into awareness. And unless they are brought into awareness, we cannot effectively deal with them. In Buddhism this version of insight is included under the heading of mindfulness.
Concentration involves the ability to keep one's attention firmly fixed on a given subject for protracted periods of time, thus overcoming the mind's usual discursive habit of flitting from subject to subject. Concentration is one of the earliest goals of Buddhist meditation.
-- Edited excerpt from Buddhist Meditation and Depth Psychology.
Resources
- The Tse Chen Ling Center is walking distance. It has free weekly practices.
- Description of Vipassana meditation
- The Five Precepts