The wandering mind

According to a quote from a verse by an ancient master, "the mind is in constant wandering, once its wandering is ceased the Buddhahood will be revealed". I have never experienced what the Buddhahood is like, however, I have trust in ancient masters, so if this is what they concluded at their time and passed down through all these great number of generations, the verse must be true and that supreme spiritual state mentioned above got to be fantastic, and so I have been seeking for an effective path in a hope that I can attain a great enlightenment and really in full control of myself one day.

I listened to a live telephone interview broadcasted by a radio media in a Sunday morning show. A psychotherapist said in the show that our mind is wired to be wandering constantly, there is no way we can manipulate our brain to stop it from thinking. This saying from an expert makes me feeling defeated as I have been trying to find out the spiritual mechanism that I can set my mind to a certain mode, pause it or even totally cease it from functioning. I would hope this psychotherapist's knowledge of the activity of the brain is not true.

There must be a method with which we can succeed in achieving the goal of awakening, at least there is this Paramita Heart Sutra revealed this case that the Bodhisattva when in deep meditation realized the emptiness nature of everything in the universe. From this recorded text, we are convinced firstly by the script that meditation involved in the quest of the total awakening. Secondly we noticed the other ingredient is the required depth of the meditation. A loose and non-effective one is not helpful in the adventure. So we can conclude that a fruitful enlightenment consists of meditation, of a deep one and of a completely disciplined one.

Is the length of time of the meditation practice important? I take a faith in the "Yes". It must be one long enough for the energetic and wild mind to calm down. Most of the time we are fed up by the boring sit even for just a minute. Most meditation enthusiasts believe 20 minutes is the minimum time required to make us feel the mind is calming down, or less active. But this is still far away from the final objective to be achieved. So more time is added on top of the last, 30 minutes, 45 minutes, one hour or even one and half an hour. The longest one that I sat through was 2 hours, yet, my mind can still be easily distracted.

How do we know if we have achieved a good meditation? The supreme achievement is the enlightened state which we will perceive the emptiness nature of our consciousness function and attain a full control over the mind. It is listening to your command, focusing on the one point of thing only for as long as you want. In saying so, we must understand this is just a way of the depiction of that supreme achievement of the meditation practice in order to get the question answered, as a matter of fact emptiness has been applied over anything and everything that even a brief retrospection of what has happened before the enlightenment is achieved is unnecessary.

I have a progressive urge of mastering the Paramita as I have passed each day because the number of days I will have to achieve this state is in its countdown phase now. I anticipate 2022 is the year I will be disappeared from this planet physically. So I must put more effort into my quest for this life goal before it is too late. Yes, I did a 2 hour meditation for the first time yesterday. I should be more determined on this important life issue.

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The Prajna Paramita Heart Sutra

This past few days, I experienced a more active wandering state than usual during my dawn meditation resulting an intensive internal self reprimand. Having detected this brain activity, I brought the thought to reciting the script of Heart Sutra. But the wandering mind soon became fed up with it and tried to move to somewhere else. I repeatedly summoned it back. The one hour duration was felt much longer than it was but I always persistently complete the sitting after the one hour session is finished. Today, the mind was behaving mostly the same except that I gave it more liberty to involve in the thinking process of contemplating the content meaning.

Unexpectedly I felt the one hour sitting was shorter than it should be. It is understandable that when we are totally engaged in something, a certain part of our brain responsible for monitoring the timeline must have become less active, and so when we have got out of the focused point, the timeline manager resumes its working standard, and our feeling of the elapse of time returns to normal. This is my personal hypothesis of how our brain works. My goal is to achieve higher level of voluntary concentration.

Let's suppose there are 8 levels (8 is my lucky number) in the meditation skill assessment. The level that Bodhisattva demonstrated as per the description mentioned in Heart Sutra is 8, while my level is 2 according to my definition, "whoever is able to remain in silence and sitting posture for a duration of one hour minimum is classified level 2." Level 1 is not difficult to attain. As long as you can remain in silence and sitting for a few seconds and more but less than one hour, you are counted in there.

It is not important about what level you have achieved but the actual ability you have acquired. In the Heart Sutra, Bodhisattva claimed "form is emptiness, emptiness is form." and also revealed the consequence of attaining the state where he experienced the ceasing of the four functions of thought processor - receiving, processing, acting and archiving of the external stimulus, is bypassing the whole bunch of suffering because of the stubborn attachment to the four functions which our brain is so designed.

The objective Buddha is trying to make us understand is to achieve the level 8 which will enable us to realize the emptiness nature of form. I agree with the saying that only the drinker himself knows how warm or cold is the water he has just drank. Heart Sutra has stated it very clearly what benefits we will get when we have attained the technique as to still the functioning of our brain at will, but it is never easy and there are a great number of practitioners including myself believe perseverance in regular practice will have its fruition one day.

Hopefully one day I can tame the wandering mind to a degree that enables me to experience the state depicted in Heart Sutra.


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