Guided Meditation with Joseph Goldstein

A guided "big mind" meditation with Buddhist teacher Joseph Goldstein.


Mind has no form, no color, and no substance; this is its empty aspect. Yet mind can know things and percieve an infinite variety of phenomena. This is its clear aspect. The inseperability of these two aspects, emptiness and clarity, is the primordial, continuous nature of mind.

At present, the natural clarity of your mind is obscured by delusions. But as the obscuration clears you will begin to uncover the radiance of awareness, until you reach a point where, just as a line traced on water disappears the moment it is made, your thoughts are liberated the moment they arise. To experience mind in this way is to encounter the very source of Buddhahood.

When the nature of mind is recognized, that is called nirvana; when it is obscured by delusion that is called samsara. Yet neither samsara nor nirvana have ever parted from the continuum of the absolute.When awareness reaches its full extent, the ramparts of delusion will have been breached and the citadel of the absolute, beyond meditation, can be seized once and for all.
~His Holiness Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche


One day, I was walking in meditation sometime after 11pm. My thoughts were almost absent. I was staying at a forest monastery and could hear a festival going on in the village in the distance. After I became tired from walking meditation, I went to my hut. As I sat down, I felt that I could not get into the crossed-legged posture fast enough. My mind naturally wanted to enter into deep concentration. It just happened on its own. I thought to my myself, "Why is it like this?" When I sat, I was truly tranquil; my mind was firm and concentrated. Not that I did not hear the sound of singing coming from the village, but I could make myself not hear it as well.

With the mind one-pointed, when I turned it toward sounds, I heard; when I did not, it was quiet. If sounds came, I would look at the one who was aware, who was separate from sounds, and contemplate, "If this isn't it, what else could it be?" I could see my mind and its object standing apart, like this bowl and kettle here. The mind and the sounds were not connected at all. I kept examining in this way, and then I understood. I saw what held subject and object together, and when the connection was broken, true peace emerged....

The awareness was as refined as seemed possible. Passing that point, the mind went in further. Inside was nothing, nothing at all; nothing went in there, nothing could reach. The awareness stopped inside for awhile and then came out. Not that I made it come out -- no, I was merely an observer, the one who was aware.
-Ajahn Chah
(quoted from A Still Forest Pool - link : http://ftp.budaedu.org/ebooks/pdf/EN1...)