Махамудра: мысли и ветры (2005, Нью-Йорк), занятие 3

[Говорящий 1]
Alright, if you notice, you'll just sit up straight, you'll keep your head comfortably, close your eyes, just close your mind at the tip of your nose for a minute, once you're ready. Now go back to those moment to moment of fleeting feelings that you're having right now. Watch them again, coming and going.

Then ask yourself, who is having these feelings? Try to locate that person. Then ask yourself, does this person who is having the feeling, own the feeling?

Can you control it? Really, unless you're experiencing total bliss right now, it's probably unlikely that you're controlling your feelings, because no one would choose anything less if they had a choice, right? So, you come to the conclusion that these feelings, which are coming and going, moment to moment, are out of our control.

There can't be a controller of the feeling. Instead, you would say, that moment to moment feeling is you. Okay.

So, these stages of Mahamudra meditations are, there are six of them, meditation of the life to calm down the six layers of emptiness. The first one is that feelings are constantly changing. It's not fixed.

Nothing is fixed. You can't hold on to anything fixed that's in your mind. The feelings in the mind are going like this, constantly shifting.

And that in itself is a very profound realization, if you get deep enough into that meditation. But it's not enough to lead us to see emptiness directly. We have to go on to step number two, which is, oh, if those feelings are just coming and going moment to moment, there must be some sort of me that's fixed, that has control of those feelings, because I can be all that I am, right?

And then you realize, you can't control your feelings in the moment. They're just reckoning for you. They're coming and going, just out of your control.

It's out of your control by the moment. Because otherwise, of course, we would all decide to be totally happy all the time. And we know that's not true, at least for most of us here.