Namo Buddhaya
Ajahn Jayasāro
—🔴🔴🔴—
For meditators today, a common malaise is spiritual nostalgia.
People with this illness suffer from their struggle to reproduce a powerful samādhi experience that occurred in the early days of their practice. They speak with awe of the unforgettable breakthrough they made in their meditation, and with sad eyes admit their frustration at being unable to experience it again.
Perhaps one day, they conclude wistfully, it will happen.
They live in hope.
In fact it is this very hope, expectation and desire that prevents them from moving forward.
The goal of Buddhist meditation is not to gain a particular profound state of mind and make it permanent.
Such a motivation would mean aiming at a heavenly rebirth. We practice for liberation. We develop samādhi in order to give the mind the necessary stability and clarify to see the nature of body and mind without distortion. Our aim is to learn from our experience whatever it may be, and not to swell on our memories of the past. There is a lot to learn from deep states of samādhi, but there are also a lot of traps we may fall into because of them.
—Ajahn Jayasāro—(17/1/23)
—🔴🔴🔴—
7 April 2023
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