Keeping Focus
The 9 stages of Shamata meditation can be divided into three main groups. Each of these groups involves a major transition in our efforts at developing focus and awareness, peacefulness and well-being, and effort and energy.
The first four stages are where we work on our basic technique, our basic mind control or focus, and awareness. In the beginning our goal is to just stay focussed on our breathing, be present, and observe our body and mind.
Stages five through seven are where we work on our levels of peacefulness and well-being, expanding them outward while we maintain our initial control and focus.
The eighth and ninth stages through to complete shamata are about working with our energy, and effort. We learn, in these stages, how to adjust our energy to the demands of the situation in front of us. We learn to make just the right amount of effort to maintain our focus, no more and no less - effectively becoming "effortless". This is where we extend the power of our minds as we learn to maintain focus and awareness, peacefulness and well-being, and energy and effort in the right balance.
In the transition from the ninth stage to full shamata, we finally achieve that balance. This is the result of familiarity combined with enthusiasm and confidence, similar to a good driver, with many years of experience, who enjoys driving.
But before we can work on everything else, we need to develop control, focus, and awareness within the present moment.
There is a tendency by some people to treat the idea of being present as the whole path. However, within the present moment, we need to learn how to work skillfully with what we are experiencing. Before we can do that, we need to learn how to control our ability to focus so that we are not overwhelmed or distracted by everything that's going on in the present. If we don't learn this, then the rabbit would explode trying to jump from one interesting thing to another. The monkey would become totally catatonic trying to keep track of everything that's going on. The elephant would go blindly blundering into things, smashing all that was around it with castastrophic results.
With these first stages, we are teaching our mind that we can stay focussed on a single thing for as long as we want. We are becoming aware of how the rabbit and the monkey can actually reduce our awareness and impede our ability to stay focussed in the present. We are teaching our mind that we are in charge. We are training the rabbit to only jump towards what we tell it to and we are teaching the monkey to only analyze after we say it's OK and otherwise to leave the elephant in our control. This is also why, within the meditation environment, we try to reduce the number of things going on around us as much as possible in order to provide less opportunity for the rabbit and the monkey to hinder our ability to regain control.
In the first three stages, we are concerned with learning to work with the Rabbit, the Monkey, and the Elephant. We keep the rabbit pre-occupied by limiting the sensory inputs around us and getting it to pay attention to our posture and feel our breathing. We pre-occupy the monkey by getting it to count the outbreaths, or maintain its attention on the focus object we have chosen and to observe our thoughts and feelings, and we also get the monkey to keep a watch on the rabbit to ensure it behaves.
Gross & Subtle Agitation
Agitation involves restlessness and mental wanderings. With gross agitation, our mind follows some distraction and eventually completely forgets about mindfulness and watching the breathing. It could be an object of the senses in the room (patterns on the rug, outside noises, other people) or it could be past events or future plans.
With subtle agitation, most of the mind stays on the breathing and only a part of the mind wanders off to something else.
Alertness is required to catch ourself wandering, and memory is required to remind ourself to return to watching our out-breaths and posture. In this way, the practice of meditation helps develop alertness, and memory.
The Importance of Space:
As we proceed through this stage, we gradually begin to notice an arising and a passing away as part of our thoughts, sensations, and emotions. With the passing away of these things, one begins to experience a gap or space. We begin to notice that we are not always thinking and feeling constantly. As our perception of this gap and this space becomes clearer, we begin to relax with the space and experience the arising and passing away of the energy of our thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations. We begin to get a sense of room between us and our sensations, thoughts and emotions. We also begin to get a sense of space between ourselves and the world around us including the thought, speech, and actions of others.
At first, this space is uncomfortable and we try to resist and avoid it. That is why, in the third stage, our mind swings wildly between agitation and a state of stillness and focus, like a bucking bronco or like the waves in a storm on the sea.
The First Steps of Practice:
There are two ways, at this point, to look at our meditation practice.
In the first, we view ourselves as starting with a large amount of agitation and dullness, which gradually diminishes over time until we reach a state of quiet, peace, stillness combined with clarity and awareness.
The second method describes how agitation arises and how we arrive at a state of peacefulness. In meditation, we start out by imitating or mimicing quiet, peace, and stillness, but, because we are unfamiliar or uncomfortable with these things, we are unable to stay quiet and still for very long. The unfamiliarity with quiet, peace, and stillness breeds fear, confusion, uneasiness, and restlessness which then develops into agitation as we run away from peacefulness or it develops into dullness which comes from being overwhelmed by the peacefulness or trying to avoid the combination of peace and clarity by shutting down.
As we get more and more comfortable with the quiet, and stillness, we become peaceful. Then our restlessness, fear and confusion become less intense and therefore our agitations and dullness become diminished. We begin to realize that we are not just our thoughts and feelings and bodily sensations, we are also this quiet, peace, and stillness. Gradually we become more comfortable remaining quiet and peaceful, and fewer things will move us away from this state of peace or prevent us from returning to this state once we've strayed.
Once our bodies and mind become peaceful, we will regain a sense of wholeness and well-being. We become less fragmented with bits of ourselves in the past, future, or tied up with all sorts of attachments, fears, and confusions. Our minds and energy become well rested and more under our control and at our disposal. This means that the way we deal with the world becomes more skillful.
The 3rd Stage - Patch-like Concentration
In the first 2 stages, we learn the basic meditation technique and we learn to identify the rabbit and the monkey. In this third stage, our mind swings wildly from staying focussed on the breathing to extreme mental wanderings and agitation. We may have the feeling that our minds are very loud and noisy, but these thoughts etc were always there. Its just that we're paying close attention to them and so they appear to be more intense. At times our attention and concentration will be strong and at other times we'll be way off. The main problem at this stage is forgetting the object - in other words, completely forgetting to pay attention to the breath.
It is like the Monkey and the Rabbit begin to protest our taking over from them in controlling the Elephant. They will attempt to create all sorts of distractions or attempt to convince us that what we're doing is foolish and unimportant. They try to persuade us that we should give up and go back to our regular way of doing things ("Leave the driving to us", they say).
The first two stages were like putting a bridle and a rope on a wild horse. In the third stage, we tie the horse to a post and it begins to realize that it is no longer in control of what it does and where it goes. Therefore it begins to buck and bellow, and pull against us. We need to persevere and maintain our hold on our wild-horse-mind until it calms down and realizes that all its protesting is not going to work in freeing it.
Sometimes, we will experience this as boredom, or restlessness. Here we need to tell ourselves that surely we can be quiet and watchful for 10 or so minutes in the course of a whole day. We need to convince ourselves of the benefits of just watching our mind for a short time in order to learn how it works and to regain control of our impulses.
If we find ourselves constantly thinking of, or being distracted by, pleasant objects, we can try to think of their temporariness and then try to let go of our attachment to them and return to focussing on the breath. Our thoughts and feelings are fed by attention. By withdrawing our attention, we starve our thoughts and feelings causing them to disappear. If that doesn't work, we can think of the negative or repulsive aspects of these objects. The most effective of these contemplations is the contemplation of the disintegration and decomposing of our body after our death. Once our mind becomes balanced again, we can return to focussing on the breathing.
If we are distracted by negative, or disturbing situations or objects, we can again reflect on their temporary nature, or reflect on their positive qualities. We could also think about something pleasant, until our mind becomes balanced and we can return to mindfulness of the breath. The most effective of these contemplations is the contemplation of loving-kindness and gratitude for the kindness of others.
We can also blame others or outside situations for disturbing us and blame our difficulties on others trying to obstruct us in our quest for peace. In this case, we need to remind ourselves about what part of the disturbance comes from us, and what part comes from outside. When someone coughs, for instance, the rabbit mind goes out towards the coughing through the sense of hearing. The monkey then evaluates it as disruptive and then proceeds to comment on the overall situation. The monkey-mind criticizes and demeans the other person for not having the self control to stop coughing or not having the consideration to continue to disturb us in this way.
The truth is that all of this extra baggage is added on by our own minds. Recognizing the coughing and recognizing the need to deal with its interruption of the quietness is separate from our mind's tendency to crave distraction and, in trying to satisfy that distraction, move its attention towards sights, sounds, and smells etc. The mind then has a strong tendency to categorize and analyze and to add criticism and judgement on to any situation. By spending all of our time criticizing and condemning, we are being taken away from our original course of action (following the breath and watching the body and mind) and the monkey and the rabbit have succeeded in regaining control.
This is an important lesson about which part of the energies we experience come from outside, and which part of the energies of a situation come from within us. The main solution is to remember that this disruption is temporary and to treat it as the background. We also need to recognize that we are in control of our portion of the disruption and to gently return our focus and awareness to mindfulness of our breathing, our body and our minds.
This is similar to the Buddhist anecdote that, when someone insults us, it is like they fired an arrow at our hearts. However, it does not hit us. It only falls at our feet. Then our impulsive tendency is to pick the arrow up and stab ourselves repeatedly with it. It's the same with disruptions, insults or angry words. They are put out in front of us, but how we react to them is our choice. Usually, without thought, we allow ourselves to be disturbed by events or hurt by the words and go over them to ourselves again and again, or relive the situation again and again in our minds. Usually we also retaliate in some way, thereby creating more misery for everyone involved, including ourselves.
So it becomes important to recognize the part of a situation that comes from outside and the part that comes from inside us. Meditation helps us begin to notice this by giving us the space, stillness and quiet to begin to recognize outside from inside.
The other thing that happens is that we begin to go over events in the past or think about things we will do in the future. The best answer to these situations is to tell ourselves that we will think of these things later, when the meditation session is over, and then we should return to watching the breathing and just observing our body and mind without getting involved in their comings and goings.
If this still doesn't work, we may need to switch the meditation object from the breathing to the aspect of our world that is causing us this worry. The main questions to ask are, "What is the real likelihood of something negative happening?" and "What is my role in this situation" and "What can I control and what do I just have to be patient with".
It's even possible at this stage to feel pride in our abilities, even to the point of thinking that we are beyond the need of meditating. When this thought occurs, we can think about how much we understand of the causes and conditions that created any of the situations that we have experienced. We can think about how well we know the future, what's happening in the present, or how well we have handled situations in our past. We can think about how much more we have to learn or that we don't understand. The most effective of these contemplations is trying to understand the process of creation and destruciton by means of causes and conditions.
Once we have diminished our inflated view of ourselves, we can return to the breathing.
With all of these things going on in our body and mind, we can feel at this point in our practice like we're in a boat riding through a rough storm, swinging up and down wildly with the waves. A lot of patience and perseverance in returning our attention to the breath is required at this stage. We can be re-assured by remembering that eventually we will become like a submarine riding under the storm, instead of like a sailboat on top of the waves and getting tossed around violently.
When wanderings are immediately recognized as soon as they occur and we return to the quiet and stillness, and the wild swinging settles down quickly, then we have completed this stage of shamata meditation. The bucking bronco starts to only prance around, and the rabbit stays by our sides most of the time and the monkey quiets down and keeps its attention on the breathing, and watches our levels of alertness, and relaxation instead of commenting on everything and chattering endlessly.
In this stage and the previous two stages, the rabbit and the monkey come more completely under our control. In this stage and the NEXT three stages, our main focus is on Agitation and Dullness. Alertness is the main qualitiy that is developed at these levels.
Our attention is called interrupted attention in the first two stages because of our inability to keep constant attention on anything. It is still functioning at this third stage of practice and will continue in this manner as we gradually develop uninterrupted attention.
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