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Last Sunday i went to Buddhist Fellowship (BF) to hear some talk after lots of weeks of laziness :p.
The topic is about meditation. What is the purpose of meditation, how meditation can help you in achieving wisdom, if not enlightenment and so on.
I get a lot of information from this talk, although after 3/4 part of that talk, my eyes and body can’t be compromised anymore and i need to move here and there to not fall asleep :p.
As you all know, our minds always move, jump from this event to another event, plan for this and after that, think of the cause and the effect and so on. If you don’t believe it, try to be quiet for 1 minute. Within that 1 minute, maybe you will think of “hey, what is that sound, what will i eat later, what movie do i want to watch tonight, who should i ask for date, hmm i want to buy that shoes” and a lot of other thoughts that will come across your mind.
One of my colleagues often takes MC as she periodically gets headache. Her doctor informed her that she has a lot of thought, she thinks too much. Well, can’t blame her for that :p.
There are 2 techniques of meditation, one is samatha and another one is vipassana. Samatha meditation is a way where we focus our minds in one object. Any object will do, but usually people will use their breath as the object as it’s convenient, you bring your breath to wherever and whenever you go.
With samatha meditation, we force our minds to only focus on our breath (if breath is the object). If our minds wander while we meditate, force it back to the breath, until one point, our minds will get used to it.
For vipassana meditation, (i quote this from wiki as i don’t really remember this part) we aimed at developing insight and wisdom through seeing the true nature of reality.
The speaker mentioned that to practice vipassana meditation, at least we need to learn or understand dhamma and we need to still our minds to make it easier for us to absorb or gain wisdom. So the basic requirements for vipassana meditation are the understanding of dhamma and the practice of samatha meditation.
Well, i think so far i only get chance to practice samatha meditation, but i also don’t do it in regular basis, so i’m still far far away from enlightenment :p.
Actually hearing this talk directly will be better to understand the basic of meditation as i’m not too good in explaining this. I’m still learning and this is the first step for me to keep and share the knowledge that i get from the talk.
