Махамудра: мысли и ветры (2005, Нью-Йорк), занятие 2

[Говорящий 2]
So, bring your back straight ahead. Place your hands down comfortably. Close your eyes.

[Говорящий 1]
Focus for just a moment on that place at the tip of your nose, just to get your mind calm. Now go back to the feeling that you identified before as having. We think of this feeling as some kind of fixed feeling, like, hmm, I'm happy right now, or hmm, I'm sad right now, or something like that.

But in reality, the feeling is changing moment to moment. Try to catch the changes. Try to watch your mind, your feeling, as it changes moment to moment.

You can open your eyes now. So, the idea of Mahābhūdra is that we're focusing on some kind of quality of the mind and the stomach. Here we're focusing on our feelings, our mental feelings.

Feelings are a really good place to start, because they're sort of like the border between the physical and the mental sides of ourselves. When we get really strong feelings, we can actually feel them in our body, right? When we get really scared, or when we get really angry, it's almost like the rage comes up from the bottom to the top, if you ever pay attention to that, despite the fact that you don't want to.

So, feelings are also the thing we most often base our decisions upon. I don't like that person. I want to be away from them.

I do like that person. I want to be next to them. And then we make all of our actions based on those kind of feelings.

But we don't really understand it very well. We don't understand how fluid they are. We're basing our whole entire lives on something so transient and amorphous and unreliable.

They are unreliable. So, it's really very profound to do this meditation on something like one's feelings. It makes a really strong change in your mind after doing it for a while, I find.

The reason to meditate on the mind itself, and not some other object outside of you, is when you don't have trouble finding the object. You're always sort of concerned with what's going on with yourself, with what's going on. So, it's very easy to locate your object and to stay on your object.

It's not like your mind is going to go wandering off very easily. And it helps control any kind of subtle dullness, because you're very interested in what you're thinking. You're very interested in what you're feeling.

So, you're focused on it very strongly. You've got a... You've got a...

What do you call it?

[Говорящий 2]
Personal interest.

[Говорящий 1]
Personal interest in what's going on there. And same with... Because you're not going to be dull about it, because you're not going to be bored, then you don't get agitated.

Your mind doesn't fly off to other things. And a very important reason is, it's a seed to prepare you for the secret teachings. This meditation on the mind.