"Right now, only this internal struggle with the afflictions is important. If you do not struggle with the afflictions, you will not achieve a pure ethical discipline, in which case, you will not attain the concentration and wisdom that, respectively, suppress and uproot the afflictions. Hence, as the Buddha said, you will have to wander continually through cyclic existence. Therefore, as I explained before, once you have identified the afflictions, reflected on their faults and on the benefits of separating from them, and planted the spies of mindfulness and vigilance, you must repeatedly fend off whatever affliction raises its head. Further, you must see any affliction as an enemy and attack it as soon as it arises in your mind. Otherwise, if you acquiesce when it first appears, and then nurture it with improper thoughts, you will have no way to defeat it, and it will conquer you in the end."
― Neu-sur-ba
The training of real meditation is very long and requires a great deal of study and practical experience. In order to understand what meditation truly is, it is not something that you can acquire by attending a meditation class once a week. By only reading a few books, websites, or watching videos, you will never, ever understand meditation.
The experience of real meditation is something that emerges in your consciousness once the proper conditions have been established inside of you. That is a result of action. So in these recent lectures we have been discussing what those conditions are, and how to establish them.
You may have attended other meditation lectures, retreats, and classes, and encountered the common approach to meditation, perhaps regarding technical aspects such as a proper posture, preliminary concentration practices, and the use of mantra. All of these are important, but really, they are a step that comes after a first step that most people skip.
Traditionally, if you were a student of a lineage such as Zen, Raja Yoga, or Tibetan Buddhism, for example, you would not be introduced to the technical details until you had extensive preliminary training—the very first training—which can extend for quite a long time, and that is training in ethics.
Of course, nowadays—especially North Americans and Europeans who are very intellectual by nature—people think that they understand ethics already, believing that ethics is easy, and that they can skip to the next "more interesting" step. This is one of the main causes for why North Americans and Europeans fail to learn how to meditate.
#gnosis #gnosticism #esotericism #mysticism #esotericknowledge #alchemy #knowthyself
