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.
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.
