Why meditate, it is a way to still the mind, to calm the mind.
So that with a calm state of mind, we find, we attune our self to how things really exist.
We take a step back from the way we're conditioned in life to view things through our culture,
commercialism, traditions, language, family, all these things, we are deeply ingrained
to function in a certain way and most of those ways that we function are dissatisfying.
There's a fundamental insecurity in how we exist.
The way that we grasp at our identity, our self, is based on, I'm good, I'm okay because
I'm working here and I have this bank account and this house and this car and these friends
and you know, so I'm cool, I'm part of this group or something and we create this image
of our self continually dependent on all these things that are not a real source of a sense
of self.
All of these things will disappear.
We will lose that car, we will lose these friends, we will lose that house.
We will lose the body in which we inhabit that forms the foundation.
We are constantly defending our sense of self and trying to make ourselves feel secure based
on all of the things that are insecure, that are impermanent, that will change and as the
world around us change, we're scrambling to find things to make us feel okay.
I'm okay because I'm white and I belong to a country club and I, you know, but that continually
building up of our sense of self is a type of neurosis and it doesn't matter how strong
we get a sense, build this neurotic sense of self, it is neurotic.
And it's fundamentally insecure and the insecurity is, it's not, it cannot be separated from
that sense of self, that insecurity will always be there.
The only way to get beyond that is to turn the mind inward and see how we create that
self and how that is an illusion and there's a deeper, calmer, peaceful, clear state of
mind that doesn't depend on all of these materialistic attachments, whether it's physical materialism
or a mental philosophy type of a possession that we might have.
I'm okay because I'm Buddhist and, you know, Buddhist have a better view of things or I'm
okay because I can meditate and I have experiences in meditation and I'm proud of that, I'm attached
to that, that you have to get underneath all these different levels of a materialistic
approach to reality, that there's something out there that's going to answer this fundamental
sense of insecurity, of dissatisfaction that goes along with the normal nature of being.
The mind and the breath are very intricately connected.
When we're agitated, we don't breathe very well.
If we learn how to breathe well and deeply, it undercuts most of the agitation in the
mind and so by calming the mind and finding this deep, clear state of mind, you can start
to perceive how things really are, as an example the impermanent nature of things, how everything
is changing.
There's not a permanent solid self, there's no permanent solid other, families, possessions,
all of the commercial consumerism around us, all these things are not answers in and of
themselves to the problems of life.
It's how we deal with them, how skillfully we make use of them and from a clear, calm
state of mind we can abandon the delusions that drive so many of our habits of relating
to the world around us through attachment or aversion, anger, desire and the underlying
one of ignorance, by understanding or at least giving our ignorance a break, giving ourselves
a break from our ignorance, we can start to see and embrace the nature of the world around
us, this impermanence, this change, this always becoming something else.
And once we can see how we are creating the world around us, how our mind is creating
the world around us and how different states of mind skillfully do good things or unskillfully
create bad things, abandon the states that create suffering, cultivate the states that
cause happiness and ourselves and others, we can bring not only ourselves to greater
and greater states of happiness, we can help all other beings find their ways out of suffering
and come to their own true natures, find their own inner source of happiness, of a peace
of mind, stillness of clarity, of embracing the change that makes anything possible in
the universe and gives us the creative ability to accomplish anything we set our minds to.
Thank you.
