Introduction to Meditation
People are attracted to the idea of meditation for different reasons. They sometimes become involved because they feel a lack of fulfilment in their lives. Other people think, "Life can be so difficult and upsetting, maybe meditation will help me to become calmer", or "Maybe meditation will give me the stability to deal with whatever happens, no matter how frustrated or negative I might feel". Those might be valid reasons for wanting to get into meditation, but they aren't the real purpose of Buddhist practice.
When people get into the practice of formless meditation and become better able to relate to their experiences, they may indeed become calmer and more stable. But from a Buddhist perspective that is just a spin-off. The purpose of this meditation is simply to connect with a feeling of spaciousness and vastness so that some kind of insight or vision associated with discovering the nature of your experience can arise through the development of awareness. When you discover something of the nature of your mind, you also see something of the nature of the world and the nature of others.
The mind is so much like an old friend we have been with all our life that we tend to take it for granted. It is as though we feel we already know everything about it. It is quite amazing how we don't bother to look at our minds or allow ourselves to relate to our experience properly. In the beginning, part of the training is to realise that you really know very little about your mind or experience. At the same time you see that it is actually possible to know.
There are some awesome discoveries to be made about the nature of your experience, which can happen by relating to the world you have with you on the meditation cushion. You don't have to go to Australia or outer space or anywhere else to make those discoveries. Buddhism is not really concerned with the idea of 'foreign travel'. There is also the incredible challenge that nobody else can make those discoveries except you. A sense of empathy and connection with other people arises naturally, because what you discover about yourself applies equally to others.
Copyright - Rigdzin Shikpo 2007