500 образов для медитации на шагах пути к просветлению, занятие 46

[Speaker 1]
This is shamatha. Sham means peace. It comes from a root, krishnam, kisham, kisham.

Yeah, kisham often comes into English as kava or kva. So quiet comes from that, calm comes from that, directly. Shamatha came directly into English as quiet or calm.

So it means stillness. First of all, somebody tell me why there's a reflection there. Good, yeah, if your mind is still then you can see emptiness.

If the mind is not still, you cannot see emptiness because it's like a reflection in the mind. If the mind is not still, emptiness cannot appear in the mind. This is very similar to an earlier idam of vipasyana and shamatha and the image was yeah, a lamp, a butter lamp, and traditionally when they explain that lamp, what number was that?

Number five, okay. It took me a long time to find a lamp that didn't have any wind, okay. Traditionally they say that shamatha is like a flame on a lamp, okay.

If it's blowing, if the wind's blowing it, it's not strong light. But if it's still, it's a strong light. And then if there's a beautiful painting, like if you go to Dunhuang and you want to see those paintings, you have to take a light inside.

It's too dark inside, right? In the ancient times they used to put a mirror outside and send the sunlight into the cave because they didn't have electricity. But if the light is still you can see these beautiful paintings on the side of the cave, like Dunhuang paintings.

But if the light's not still, you can't see them very clearly, okay. So number five and number 46 are connected, okay. Now, what does it mean what we cannot afford not to have?

In Tibetan, mi chok me. Nice, keep going. First form level meditation is divided into two or three parts.

One's called preliminary, one called main stage, one called finishing stage. The preliminary stage is called mi chok me. And it means you need this thing.

You can't afford not to put this roof on this cabin today. You got to do it. It means you got to have this thing, okay.

You cannot afford not to have it, okay. The word for the level of meditation you need to see emptiness directly is you cannot afford not to have it. It's the word in Tibetan and Sanskrit, mi chok me, okay.

You don't have... If you don't have it, you're in trouble, okay. If you want to see emptiness directly, you must get to this level.

Which one of the eight levels of the lion's stance are we really talking about? Lion's stance. Not the nine levels of meditation.

Not the poster. Not the stages of meditation. The first one, the heartbeat.

Okay. If you really could stay on the heartbeat, you could see emptiness. You have enough meditation to see emptiness.

Forget the other seven. Okay. If you were ready to stay on the heartbeat, mi chok me, sam ten dong pa nye rin dong means if you had real focus on your heartbeat, you would have enough meditation to see emptiness directly.

Which means when we go through the lion's stance, we're just pretending to go through those eight, okay. We're not doing the real one. It's similar to the ninth level when you pretend that you are seeing your past life, okay.

The first eight are also pretending. Okay, if you could really do heartbeat, you'd have enough meditation to see emptiness directly. You would have shamatha, okay.

Yikes. Okay. So the eight levels were just pretending on the elevator, okay.

We don't have the real one, but as those tantricists know, kye rim, if you pretend long enough, it happens. If you dress up like Vajragini long enough, you're going to look, you're going to change into Vajragini. It takes a lot of times, but okay.

All right, okay.