Meditations on meditation

One of my goals here was to learn how to meditate. We have meditation practice at 8 every morning.

The first week we focused on following our breath, which is supposed to help you concentrate. I have difficulty not thinking, but it is an interesting experiment and definitely calming. It also helps me to feel disciplined.

This morning the nun led us through analytic meditation, which differs in that instead of releasing your thoughts, you think about specific things. For the first session, we focused on thinking about the suffering felt by all beings.

She started by having us imagine the suffering an insect must experience, then a dog or a monkey, then a starving or cold person (physical suffering), then a blind, deaf or paralyzed person (which to me represented the combination of physical and mental suffering, because you cannot fully experience the world or express yourself), then a mentally ill person and someone who only grasps for material possessions (which both seemed to represent mental suffering). Then we were supposed to think about how lucky we are to live comfortable lives.

I found this really difficult for a few reasons. Firstly, I have no idea what the suffering of an insect feels like. I tried to imagine a dog's suffering or a monkey's suffering, because hunger seems the same in all species. But then I started thinking about the monkey that stole my popcorn yesterday and got caught up in thinking that he was a selfish monkey. Clearly I am not yet good at the Buddhist way of thinking, because when I brought this up after the session one of the guys on the trip said he imagined how hungry the monkey must have been to steal my popcorn. Maybe this is true, and it's definitely a good way to think about it for meditation on suffering, but this was a fat monkey and they just steal food from everyone. (Just To clarify, I sound really angry about the monkey. I kind of am, not because I wanted the popcorn but because the monkey so blatantly stole it while I was right there. Also because the monkeys do things just to scare us.)

Secondly, much of the reading talks about how the ultimate truth is that the entire world is actually empty. This is a difficult concept, but part of it means that there is no distinction between me and you or me and a rock or whatnot. So while we were supposed to be thinking about how lucky we were to be born into a relatively good life, I started questioning why I should be thankful and why there are different levels of beingness (I.e. Insect, dog, people) if we are all ultimately the same. The Buddhists call this the conventional world, and the actual world is the empty one, but why should we all agree to live in the conventional world if there is inequality and whatever? Mostly meditation was frustrating.

Also a monkey just stole Claudia 's bananas. The most frustrating thing about india: meditation and monkeys.

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