Question
Hi,
Plz tell me that through meditation does a person can come to know,why some thing happened 2 him in past?If yes,please tell me the way.Also tell me the basic requirement for doing meditation.Reply me at "luckkky6@hotmail.com"
Answer
Hi, Nirmal.
Thanks for your note. You don't say too much about why you want to know the reasons for what happened to you, so I am just guessing. If I am way off, you can let me know and we will start all over again.
Possibly either something bad happened to you in the past and you want to know why so you can maybe avoid it or at least feel better if you understand it. Or possibly something very nice happened to you and you wonder why it hasn't happened again. We can talk about both of these things. If it is not really your situation, maybe at least it will be interesting for you.
Maybe you remember something bad that happened to you. Maybe it had to do with how people treated you or something you did that ended up hurting you. Possibly this event caused you a lot of pain at the time and continues to cause you pain when you think about it or think about the possibility of it happening again. You may feel very vulnerable because you don't feel like you have control over it. You may think that maybe if you understood exactly what happened, you could control it and keep it from happening. This is the way we all think about these things. Let's look at it more closely and see if these thoughts are valid at all.
Possibly you have thought about the bad event many times since it happened. From your question it is clear that you still don't understand why it happened. Now, if you have not thought about it carefully before, you could certainly think carefully about the situation now, maybe by yourself or maybe with a counselor or friend. You can ask yourself if you have looked honestly at what you contributed to the situation, if there were things that you did that might have made things worse.
If you can look at yourself very honestly, you will learn things about yourself and about other people that you didn't understand before. We don't like to see negative things in ourselves. It offends our image of ourselves. But in fact this self-protection only prevents us from understanding ourselves and others and from possibly being able to live more freely. So what use is it to defend my image of myself if it only makes my life more painful?
Maybe you will ask yourself this question but will still not see anything new. That's ok. If you sit quietly, with a relatively quiet mind and body, not trying to do anything but rather just beginning to notice what is actually present, you will allow the mind some space to reveal itself. This means you may begin to notice how you think and to what extent you notice or don't notice what is actually here - the body, the breath, the warm air, the sound of the fan.
As you begin to notice how you think, you may notice that there are patterns of how you see people and how you react to them. You may begin to realize that these patterns make assumptions about other people that are not necessarily true and that because of that, your actions toward them are mistaken and therefore may generate pain and conflict.
As you are more able to notice your thoughts, you may also notice that the space of noticing has its own wisdom. It reveals thought patterns as prerecorded assumptions that are usually inaccurate. However, this same space of noticing reveals your arms and legs, which we usually notice very little except for the pains they give us. It reveals the breath moving in and out of the body and the sounds around us. All of this is revealed in one undivided noticing or awareness. And when you interact with other people, this space of noticing may reveal something about the other people so that you respond to them appropriately.
You may start to notice that there is a complete difference between reacting to the world out of past assumptions - which is full of fear and self enclosure - and responding to the world out of a vast space of attention - which has patience, wisdom and affection and above all a lack of separation.
So have we addressed your concern about what might have happened to you in the past? What happened in the past is what happens to most human beings most of the time. You suffered from the pain caused to you by either your own reactions or the reactions of others which happened to find you in their way. What is the possible way out of this? To begin to know yourself, to see your own patterns of reaction and to listen carefully and caringly to yourself and the world around you with a great, honest open space. Can you begin to find this space in your quiet sitting? At first you may only hear and feel the noise of thoughts, but even this is a start of noticing, because you may not have noticed the noise very carefully before.
There is no guarantee that we will not experience pain. The Buddha's first noble truth was that life is pain. But there is a world of difference between the simple experience of pain and the suffering caused when thinking makes it into something to be feared and defended against.
What is the basic requirement for doing meditation? It is just what I've described above. There is no technique or repetition, because these things are themselves the noisy patterns of the brain. It is not necessary to change the nature of the mind. The mind that wants to change things is the same mind that is the problem. Simply let things be revealed in a space of quiet listening, quiet attention or presence. The mind that we can see, hear, feel, know, is only a small part of what we can call Mind. Most of mind is invisible, silent, unknowable. And yet that is the source of intelligence, of compassion, of life itself. And it reveals itself when the normal mind becomes quiet.
Let's come back to the second possibility that what happened to you before was something good, something transcendent and you wonder why or how to get it back. The answer is the same as what I just described. Does this make sense to you that by letting the mind become quiet and by finding this open space of simple presence, the body and mind begin to respond naturally to the simple energy of life in a way that makes it easier to live without separation, without fear, without having to defend anything?
Then there may be moments of wide open love and affection that embrace the whole world.
I don't know if I've addressed your concerns. If you have some more questions, please write back to me. If it is not convenient for you to use this site, we can write by direct email. Just let me know. It can be very helpful to write back and forth about a question such as yours so we can understand each other and look more deeply into the question.
Best wishes,
Jay Cutts
