Lessons In Practical Buddhism - Sirimangalo.Org

many minutes, hours, days, or even years you practice
meditation; in order to understand reality, you have to
meditate just now. If you clearly see an experience as it is
for a single moment, then that moment is meditation, and
has no bearing on the next moment. Progress in meditation
is dependent on stringing together moment after moment of
clear awareness until the habits we have formed based on
ignorance are replaced by new habits leading to clarity and
insight.
At every moment of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting,
feeling or thinking, we react according to our habitual
programming; if we have conceived a liking for something in
the past, our reaction will generally be to desire it; if we have
conceived a disliking for something, we are more than likely
reject it. This patterned behaviour occurs incessantly, so in
order to combat addiction and aversion our meditation must
be likewise incessant; it must be a moment to moment
activity. This is the basis of the practice of mindfulness. As
the stomach rises, we focus on it for that moment, then let it
go when it is gone; as the stomach falls, we likewise
recognize it for what it is and then forget about it. Our only
work should be to affirm the nature of the object in the mind
moment after moment, so that it reacts not out of ignorance
but out of clear and pure awareness of the object as it is:
seeing is seeing, hearing is hearing, smelling is smelling,
tasting is tasting, feeling is feeling, thinking is thinking. This
is what is meant by the practice of “sati” or “mindfulness – to
remind ourselves of the object for what it is, so that there is
no room for judgement or partiality of any kind.
The way we do this is by identifying the experience with a
word, and using the word in much the same way as other
meditation traditions use a mantra – reciting it to focus the
mind, in this case on ultimate reality. A mantra is a common
tool in meditation practice, used by practitioners before the
Buddha began to teach; it’s just a word or phrase that is
repeated internally to focus the mind. Mantra meditation as
practised in other traditions, however, generally has nothing
to do with the reality of mundane experience – one does not
hear of spiritual practitioners in other traditions using
mantras like “walking” or “pain”, since these are not
generally considered valid objects of spiritual development
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