Penetrating the Present Moment

When practicing meditation, it is best to keep it simple.  The Buddha taught that suffering, change, and emptiness are natural elements of life.   People practicing meditation have a perfectly reasonable desire to escape the pain of suffering and change.  They see the Buddha's serene smile, understanding it as a symbol that he has dropped the burden of self.   Those of us attracted to meditation are often drawn to the more esoteric teachings of Mahayana Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta that seem to promise the realization of emptiness.   

Angarika Munindra is not well known but he was an influential figure in the transmission of Vipassana to the west.  Grounded in the Theravada, he taught  meditation stripped of cultural baggage and, he stuck to the basics of suffering, impermanence, and emptiness. 

He taught his students that they had a choice between two worlds, a world of concepts and  a world of experience.  Concept and experience blend so seamlessly for most of us that the idea that they are separable might well come as a revelation.  Usually, we simply assume that what we feel is an accurate reflection of real world conditions.  

Experience is immediate- seeing, hearing, tasting, feeling.  What you feel is what is.  It is very simple, very stable.  Whatever you add to that, and if you are anything like me, you tend to add quite a lot, is conceptual.  You experience a feeling.  You interpret it as uncomfortable.   You decide that it feels really, really bad.  Then you start coming  up with explanations  as to why you feel that way.  From there, you brainstorm escape plans, all the while imagining the even more dreadful  pain of it all..  

One of the imaginable, less harmful and actually elegant solutions that you might come up with  is the perfect escape, an escape into the realization of bare awareness.  The problem with that concept is that the immediate experience, the raw feeling of discontent that you wish to escape, is bare awareness.  Meditation is the art of patiently directing attention toward that raw pain until it dissolves.

The understanding of suffering is the key.  Suffering occupies a really broad spectrum of human experience, ranging from the petty grievances and inconveniences that make up daily life to the sharp daggers of inconsolable grief.  As long as you think you shouldn't have to suffer, you'll spend your energy in the conceptual world.  When you meditate to escape suffering, meditation is not meditation, only imagination.  

Suffering is just physical discomfort.  You need not dramatize it but you need to experience it as directly as possible.   You'll never think so until  it passes but it is really valuable to experience a huge emotional storm that  you can't control or manage with distraction.  The mindful experience of pain is the penetration of the present moment. Mindful witness to out of control thoughts, the desire to sink into depression or to explode with rage, is meditation.  When you meditate you learn what everyone in the world is up against. 

As long as you believe you can escape suffering you will measure yourself and others against an arbitrary but harsh  standard that creates even more suffering.  When you experience the full range of  suffering as the daily bread of existence, you lighten it for yourself and for others.  

In Zen. mindful suffering is known as the "gateless gate."