I want to talk about Freedom today.
Larry Rosenberg, an American Buddhist teacher who founded the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center, discusses watching your breath, in his book Breath by Breath. The book is about mindfulness and the mind. He warns:
The point is to change our mind from a battlefield, where we're always fighting these (mind) states, or getting lost in them, to a place of peaceful coexistence. Then these visitors, these guests in consciousness, don't have such power.
He says when we succeed with meditation: "When that happens, these states start thinning out, falling away." This is a step towards freedom.
The Buddha told us long ago that it is our attachments that cause our suffering – our dukkha. The way to end attachments is by simply watching them arise. We observe and get to know our cravings. Then, instead of just instinctually reacting to them, trying to obtain whatever it is we want at that moment, we just let the thoughts or feelings come and go. This is where freedom begins. Rosenberg says that there is something false about trying to let go. Often it is an attempt to push away, which means a struggle is occurring. The practice is not to struggle or push away desire or attachment, but simply to observe it. And let it pass.
Wishing thoughts and feelings don't happen is pointless; it doesn't work to force them away. All our states of mind need to be accepted. Let them come, let them blossom, look at them closely and when they go, let them pass. This brings freedom from these thoughts; they no longer are something that you need to act on.
More than 2000 years after Buddha, Ramana Maharshi told how to sharpen our understanding of the mind and thought. He taught that the primary thought, the first, idea is the idea of “I”, that “I am this body, this individual,” and only after that thought of “I” is the thought of “Other” and “the world.” All our thoughts of others and the world are just in relation to this primary thought of “I.” So, we really do not need to study all thoughts, we just need to get to the bottom of this primary “I”‐thought. For most of us, we never think to challenge this idea of ourselves. We just accept the idea that we are defined by our ideas of ourselves and our roles in life. To challenge this idea, and to find out that you are really not all those things you thought about yourself brings a deep sense of freedom.
VIDEO: THE FOUR LIBERATIONS FOR MEDITATION WITH YONGEY MINGYUR RINPOCHE