The bells!

Last night I went to this meditation course I’ve been doing every couple of weeks and it was a really good session. We talked a lot about thoughts, what they are and how to deal with them. I loved the idea of dealing with thoughts, when they intrude on your meditation as they are bound to, by not engaging at all with the content of the thought, but merely recognising the process of “I am thinking” or “I am planning” or “I am remembering”.

I gave it a try in meditation and it is really powerful, suddenly you just disengage from any emotional connection with the thought itself and just notice the process of thinking and let it go. It’s amazing how sneaky thoughts can be, the way the mind can ever so subtly go from focussing on the breath to picking up a strand of thought and running away with it before you even realise you’re thinking at all! Damn my mind is like a kid with ADD.

But for a few moments there last night I had a really interesting experience of being really vigilant and being able to notice very quickly when I had moved into thinking and then detach from it instantly. It’s a good start.



The other cool thing was the gongs! This guy Malcolm has a little house in North Sydney just behind all the office buildings and inside there’s this huge room decked out with crazy Buddhist paraphernalia - it looks like the inside of some temple - and there’s this short elderly mild-mannered and quietly spoken Aussie guy who is just great. Anyway he’s got these huge gongs and bells and drums and last night we all had a go banging on them and the sounds were absolutely incredible. Then we used them along with chanting in the meditation – it was quite an experience.



Oh yeah the other thing I really like was the idea that if you are going to think at all, try to put your mind onto useful thoughts. These are positive thoughts that help yourself and help all other living things. Basically the idea is that, like with anything else, the more you practise something the more natural you get at doing it automatically. So trying to only think useful thoughts will eventually become a habit. That's pretty cool.