Looked at another house yesterday. Quite close to both a red line stop and a nice yoga studio. I wasn’t overwhelmed, but the price was right – and it’s a lot of house for that price. The best part – there’s a room upstairs that would make the cutest little meditation sanctuary.
Picked up How to See Yourself as you Really Are by the Dalai Lama. It’s a relatively clear beginners guide to the Buddhist concepts of emptiness and the development of insight and wisdom. At this point I have very little idea what would be good starting points for other people – but it covers those core concepts in clear and concise language. I find that I much prefer books written by the Dalai Lama, rather than texts by others, derived from meetings and conversations with him.
In it, he lays out some relatively measurable milestones in meditative stabilization. Interesting that, just like with any other learned skill, we can map out the way it’s going to go if you keep working at it. Even our minds are not so terribly special and different from one another! “If this is happening when you meditate, then you are probably also experiencing this, and these are some steps that have worked for other people.”
I find that I’m probably at what he describes as the second or third of nine or ten stages. Broadly speaking, I can now recognize distraction as it’s happening … but it’s still a constant effort of patching up my mental state rather than “abiding.”
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