Meditation Class 7, 8, and 9

Class Nine Meditation

  • Picture the outline of your body’s physical form.
  • Then try to catch the mental image.
  • Go around to the different parts of your body and understand that through your sense of feeling you could never feel more than one part at a time which the mind then glues together to form a body.
  • Our own body is just like the table. The mind is creating it.
  • Hold on to the mental image that your mind creates of it.
  • See if you can drop the mental image of the body and check to see if there is another one – besides the image – out there.
  • See it as coming from the mind.
  • Seems like there is something making the image – the projector.
  • The projector as a solid fixed thing that is thinking of our mind as self existent.
  • Then think about what MK was telling us.
  • If there is no body out there. If there is no object there can be no subject state of mind.
  • This idea that something is controlling the images – the projector – the subject state of mind, is just something that is ripening for us moment to moment.
  • Get the feeling in your mind of how the mental images are coming and going.
  • With no one to boss them around they just ripen and go out of existence every moment.
  • The experiencing.
  • Try to find the highest understanding you have of that and then hold your mind on that.
  • Take that understanding that you found and see if that is also just a moment to moment ripening of a mental image.
  • Does that understanding that you found exist in truth?



Class Eight Meditation

  • Focus on your breath
  • Now see your Lama in front of you.
  • Think about all the work you’ve done these last four weeks.
  • Make an offering to them - especially your efforts to come to a higher understanding of emptiness.
  • They are incredibly happy with you.
  • They rise up to the top of your head and melt down into you and become part of you.
  • Now picture your body as hollow. No organs, no insides, just crystal colored light. Fill every crevice. Go down from the top catching all the little details.
  • Along the way you can think about how it would be possible to have this body.
  • It and the one you have now are made of the same stuff.
  • Now picture a hollow tube about the size of a soda straw coming up where your backbone used to be all the way up to the top of your head.
  • It stretches up to the polestar, down to the center of the earth.
  • It’s ruby colored.
  • Now bring your attention into the tube where your heart used to be. Your thoughts flow by within the tube. Watch them float by.
  • Try to feel it.
  • Try to move your mind inside the tube so that it’s as if this tube becomes your body and everything else is just outside.
  • If you lose it and feel there is an outer body, wrap the outer body around the tube and become the tube again.
  • There is no other body besides it.
  • Whatever movement there is is all within the tube.
  • If you lose feeling of the tube go deep within again.
  • Now bring yourself outside that tube and see if there is any other body outside that tube.
  • Like a new body you are this body of light.
  • All the wisdom you have gained in this course. All the compassion that has grown in you makes the light body brighter.
  • Out of your pores comes this radiant light.
  • You are like the sun. Your rays touch every being and fill them with understanding of emptiness.
  • Now pull all of those light rays into your heart.
  • Dedicate everything you have done in this class, all your effort, to seeing emptiness directly.


Class Seven First Meditation
Peeling away the layers of 'me':

  • If someone were to ask you who are you how would you define yourself?
  • Try to use as many nouns as you can.
  • Maybe you’re seeing that it often depends on who you’re speaking to and what the situation is. That you’re a little different in each one.
  • Now take these collection of images that you have of yourself and see if you can start pulling them away like the skin of an onion.
  • If you kept pulling away these identities what would be the core you?
  • Is there anything about you that doesn’t have to do with the outside?
  • With how people think about you, about things you do?
  • What if you gave yourself a different name, a different body, a different memory?
  • Would you still be you? END MED.
Class Seven Second Meditation
Using the Ajna Chakra to get to a single point:
  • Remember who you’re doing this for.
  • You have to reach a place of stillness and see emptiness directly to end suffering in your world.
  • Place your tongue on the roof of your mouth and feel the bump there.
  • Draw a straight line up from there.
  • Then go to the place between your eyebrows and draw a straight line back.
  • At the place where those two lines intersect see a point of light.
  • This is your ajna chakra. See that light as the source of your breath.
  • The light is like the moon and your breath is like the tide.
  • If you lose the light find it again and place your mind there.
  • The light dims and brightens.
  • Don’t try to control the breath, let it naturally flow like the tide.