Shamata and vipassana
The practice of meditation has two elements. The first one is calmness meditation. It’s called shamata in the Pali language of old India, where it was developed. You can think of shamata like this: You have a glass of water. It’s full of chalk dust or fine mud, so when you stir it up, the water’s all cloudy and turbulent. You can’t see through it at all. But if you put the glass down on a table and wait, over time all the dust and mud particles settle. Eventually all that is left is clear water with a sediment on the bottom.
This process of settling is very similar to shamata. Shamata is about learning to leave things alone, not to react, not to stir up the mud and cloud our vision. Shamata meditation sessions are about reducing reactivity so that our psychology isn’t being wound up all the time, reacting to events that arise in our constructed experience. It’s a skill we can learn in a surprisingly short amount of time, as long as we know exactly what we’re doing.
As with learning any skill, it’s important to understand the instrument we’re working with, our own mind. This incredible instrument is the one within which we were born and within which we’ll die. Honestly, it would be wonderful if we were all born with an instruction manual, but as it is, we come into the world and have to make it up as we go along!
So how can we usefully describe our experience? We could say our mind has six inputs, like a six-channel parallel processor: an input for each of the five senses, and an input for our thoughts and feelings. Or we could say the mind is like a city with six gates: again, one gate for each of the five senses and another for thoughts and feelings. These gates are the six channels of experience.
What happens in our cognitive process is that our attention is directed to inputs at one or another of the gates from moment to moment, depending on how important we find it. The sense of importance that causes us to pay attention to one gate or another is often related to threat. If our senses detect a formation that seems to be a threatening pattern, our attention is switched to that sense gate. This unconscious reactivity is what causes the sense of pervasive disquiet we so often experience.
It’s difficult to address all six gates at the same time. So in order to reduce our reactivity, many meditation techniques simplify our experience by focusing on one of the gates and asking us to ignore the other five. This enables us to control our reactivity more effectively with reference to a single channel, rather than to all six. The effect is to quiet all our senses. If we’re able to reduce reactivity in one of the gates, it makes all of them less reactive. So the dust and mud begin to settle in the glass; the water of our experience begins to clarify; and we begin to see clearly.
That clarity, in the ancient language of India, is called vipassana. Passana means “seeing,” and vi means “discriminating” or “clear”—“clear seeing.” This is the other element of meditation. Clear seeing is the fruit of calmness. We can see clearly when all the dust and mud have settled in a glass of water. So vipassana is the fruit of shamata. Put another way, until we have shamata, vipassana isn’t possible, because the water is so cloudy we can’t see anything at all.
Exercise: Watching a candle
It’s time to inquire how we can begin to approach the practice of shamata. As long as we understand what we’re doing, and do it single-mindedly, three minutes a day is enough. To work with this book is to make a promise that we’ll try the exercises for three minutes a day. That’s all. If we’re really ambitious, we can do three minutes twice a day, perhaps morning and evening, but really all that’s required is three minutes once a day.
For this week’s practice, the key is to have a clear intention and a good understanding that what we’re doing is limiting our experience to one of the sense gates and focusing on that.
We can start by using our familiar faculty of concentration, something we’ve been taught to do from our earliest childhood, to focus on one sense gate to the exclusion of the others. This is a famous meditation technique. It’s called trataka in the old Yogic tradition. Trataka can be done with any sensation, such as a sound or touch, but vision is generally our most dominant gate, so it makes sense to start there.
One of the most accessible ways to do it is to watch a candle flame. Of course, one can use any sense input in this manner, be it hearing, tasting, touching, feeling or indeed, thoughts. The key is to select one sense gate and follow it.
What we do is light a candle and focus our eyes on the flame for three minutes. It quivers and moves, and every now and then our concentration will also waver. We just bring our attention back to watching the flame. It’s actually good that the candle flame is slightly moving. With a static object, like a statue or something, one tends to glaze over and lose focus because nothing’s happening; it’s not engaging enough. That blankness isn’t concentrated attention.
Choose any candle you like. Put it about six inches away. Sit comfortably. A straight back is good so that you’re stable and not leaning one way or another. Then rest your gaze on the candle flame. Every time your concentration wanders off, bring it back.
By doing this we’re gradually educating our attentive capacity, telling it that we want it to rest on this object. There is no need to provide any further rationale—that we’re doing it for this reason or that. We just watch.
Whenever a thought comes or a sound happens, it attracts our attention to another gate. All we do is merely turn back and place our attention on the flame again. If we can do this for three minutes a day for the next seven days, it’ll create the basis for the next step.
You could say that successful shamata is when our concentration has become so stable and effortless that it’s not disturbed by anything. Our mind becomes flexible, calm and compliant, able to rest on any object we choose without worry or aversion. And that’s one of the goals we’re working towards.
5 obstacles to meditation
There are five obstacles that immediately begin to manifest when we do something like this. In meditation manuals, they’re called the five nivaranas, or the five hindrances. They come in two pairs, plus an odd one.
The first pair is agitation and dullness. Agitation is what many of us begin to notice when we sit quietly. A sea of agitation is churning beneath our normal awareness. This chatter is the first insight into our mental apparatus. Our minds are always working away, taking inputs from our senses, comparing them to past experiences and projecting future outcomes. As such, this activity has high value in terms of human cognition and evolution, even if it is a source of stress.
This remarkable capacity allows us to learn from experience and use those memories to guide our future actions. It has taken a lowly ape and, over the eons, elevated it into a position of world domination. But when we begin to rest the mind, all this activity suddenly becomes apparent. It’s actually going on all the time. We just don’t notice it.
As we bring our attention back to the candle flame, sometimes the opposite manifests, and we become sleepy or dull. Dullness is the next obstacle; it’s as if we’ve suddenly become exhausted. Again, the trick is not to resist too strongly. We patiently bring our attention back to the candle flame. It’s only three minutes, after all!
The second pair of obstacles manifests as two types of disturbing thoughts. The first is when we wander off into daydreams of things that attract us—things we want or desire. The second is when we wander off into thinking about things we want to avoid or change. But with this wandering tendency that manifests as the nivaranas of attraction and aversion, too, we can be patient. These fantasies are normal activity—planning and imagining scenarios—that goes on all the time.
Finally, as we bring our attention back, the last nivarana manifests. It’s doubt—the final obstacle to any change. “Why should I do this?” we say to ourselves. “What is the point?” When this happens, we simply have to take back the reins of our attention and rest it on the object, in this case, the candle, without providing explanations or debating with ourselves. It’s like the Nike slogan—just do it!
Questions and comments
Is the final nivarana, doubt, something like “Why am I doing this? I have better things to do?”
Yes. It’s “Why am I bothering?” It comes up much more later on. It’s the ultimate nivarana. You could argue, “There’s a real world out there. We’ve got nuclear weapons. We’ve got good mobile phones. Why bother doing this?” That doubt is a very powerful impulse, behind which lies the gate to wisdom.
When doing this exercise, I’ve found that I can focus my attention on the flame in different ways. For example, I can outline it, stare at it, or follow the different lines formed by its wavering. Or should I just gaze at it in an unfocused way?
A gaze leads to one of the nivaranas: it tends to drift into a drowsiness. You don’t want to gaze; rather, look at the flame. You can examine it if you like, but not so that you make a commentary. You’re going to get a lot of resistance from your six-channel parallel processor, which will try to look hard, or examine, or space out. Try to avoid that. Look. Stay with the object, without any other intention.
It‘s easier to stay with an object and not fall asleep or get distracted if it’s an object I’m interested in. For example, I was looking at pictures of lakes and streams, and I found it easier to focus on them. I get distracted more easily with the candle flame.
You’re getting fooled by your mental apparatus. We’re not trying to be interested. All we’re trying to do is rest our attention on a chosen object. This is a first step. We say to our mental apparatus, “Stop here. Do that and nothing more.” It’s always going to give us its little game. Instead of resting in attention, we often enter a commentary about the object. The object ceases to exist, and the commentary consumes us. We’ll talk about this in the sessions to come. For now, keep returning your attention to the candle flame.
Richard Dixey, Ph.D., is a senior faculty member at Dharma College and the author of Three Minutes a Day. A research scientist and a lifelong student of Buddhism who holds advanced degrees in biophysics and the history and philosophy of science, he directed a bioelectronic research unit at a London hospital before becoming CEO of his own biotech company. Dixey moved to the U.S. in 2007 to devote himself to teaching meditation, deepening his own practice, and running the Light of Buddhadharma Foundation in India with his wife Wangmo, the eldest daughter of the well-known Tibetan lama Tarthang Tulk. For more information visit www.richarddixey.com.
Adapted from the book Three Minutes a Day: A Fourteen-Week Course to Learn Meditation and Transform Your Life ©2023 by Richard Dixey. Printed with permission from New World Library—www.newworldlibrary.com.
imagens: Depositphotos
