Reading the Signs

When it comes to meditation, we have to rely on our own experience. If we just take what somebody else says, take their experience of meditation and attempt to replicate it, things are not going to go very well. Like that, we will never come to know meditation for ourselves.

To give an example: let’s say that I’m a skilled meditator and meditation teacher. If I then explain my meditation to you, telling you to meditate like this and like that, and you go away and try to follow that, your meditation won’t really progress. And it’s the same if you try to meditate based on instructions in a text. We can’t say there’ll be no benefit at all, but there will be very little.

How well a lama is able to convey those signs depends on their own experience and practice – on how clear they themselves are about the meditation – and how skilful they are at communicating the signs a student needs, in a way that they can understand them and thus come to have their own authentic understanding and experience of meditation. And the student’s ability to do that, to understand and get the message, depends on their intelligence (prajna), and the experience they’ve gained so far.

For example, if someone makes a hand gesture. It’s a sign, isn’t it? But, if someone else watching doesn’t concentrate on the meaning being signed and instead only thinks about the hand, then they won’t get the message. They will have missed the point. It’s the same with meditation.

One has to use one’s own experience and intelligence to get the point being signed by the words of the lama, or the text, to know what they’re trying to show us. Just trying to meditate on what we’ve heard or read in the texts, is the same as sticking to the signs and not thinking about their actual meaning. And that makes the whole process a bit silly.

We shouldn’t see meditation to be something simple. It isn’t easy. But we also shouldn’t feel that it’s beyond us, because it’s not as though we need to obtain anything from outside. Rather, it’s all to do with our own mind. So, as we have a mind, it’s doable. We’re able to think about it because we’re dealing with what we already have.

So although meditation is not easy, it’s also not beyond us. That’s the right approach.