500 образов для медитации на шагах пути к просветлению, занятие 40

[Speaker 1]
Meditation progress level four. Now you can hold the object, so it's not like the famous example is you're meditating on your lama's face and slowly it turned into a donut. You know, don't laugh, it happens to me.

Okay, it became a donut. Like, that's not possible anymore. Okay, by level four you're not losing the object anymore.

You are glued to the object. No trouble of the lama's face suddenly turning into a maple-covered donut. Now, when I met Goenka, what is it, in 1975 I think, I was there for a ten-day teaching and as I told you at the beginning, he said, don't think of monkeys.

And so the whole ten days all you can think of is monkeys. So anyway, you got the object, you didn't think about monkeys. Okay, you're holding on to the object.

And Pabongka says it's like you feel like you're holding a hammer firmly, you know, like it's not gonna slip out of your hand. You have a good firm hold on the object. Now we can talk about quality of the meditation.

You see what I mean? Now you're meditating. Now we can talk about good meditation or bad meditation.

But in level four you're meditating. Okay, you're holding an object mentally. Okay, and maybe the first three you can't even call it meditation.

Okay, you have to be holding an object strongly. Now it's possible to have the two problems. You get sleepy or you get busy.

Okay, start thinking about many things or you get sleepy. Sleepy doesn't refer to feeling sleepy. It refers to the object not bright in your mind.

Okay, it's a feeling about the object and it's not literally sleepy. Okay, if you're sleepy you probably lost the object a long time ago. Okay, sleepy mind, dullness means you're not really interested in the object.

Okay, got it?