A fire reflected in a lake cannot burn the water. Neither can emotions disturb the mind when you don’t get involved in them. Don’t identify an emotion as your self. The fear or anger is not you, only an impersonal phenomenon. Mentally pull back from the emotion and turn your awareness around to observe it. When in the grip of negative emotion we tend to believe it will never end. But emotions are no more permanent than thoughts.
With continued practice you’ll find that you only have to wait and any emotion, whether pleasant or unpleasant, is bound to change.
–Cynthia Thatcher, from Just Seeing: Insight Mediation and Sense-Perception (Buddhist Publication Society)
James: It sure is hard not to identify with emotions--especially when an emotional reaction is so ingrained within the psyche that its emergence seems totally involuntary. However, we know that at some level we have made a conscious choice to react in one way or another. We feel so helpless and at the mercy of these destructive and misery creating emotions. The suffering they engender is so great that it is like experiencing a nightmare.
A nightmare is a pseudo reality where the most ridiculous, terrifying and outlandish events stream through our mind like an all too real virtual reality, interactive video game. The nightmare seems so plausible--perhaps we find ourselves fleeing from a monster in our dream. Or maybe we get ourselves into some crazy situation such as a recurring dream of mine where I end up unjustly thrown in prison--an innocent man. The terror and suffering in those moments are so visceral that they can even cause the physical body to wake up sweating and gasping for air as if the body was in a real fight or flight situation.
There is, however, something called, "lucid dreaming" where a person is aware that they are dreaming--as they are dreaming. I have experienced this phenomenon every so often and it is often like watching things unfold from a third person point of view, which usually lessons the impact of the events. It is a way to step back from what is going on and get a bigger picture view of it all and see that in truth you are not going to die, or get thrown in prison or lose your parent, child or spouse. It is said that a person can train their mind to be able to go into this third person vantage point while dreaming to better deal with and process the events and impacts of the dreams.
In this way, I see meditation as the lucid dreaming of the waking state to be practiced and fine tuned to be a set of tools to enable us to walk through samsara and accumulate less heavy karmic debts.
~Peace to all beings~
