Eyes Wide Open

THICH NHAT HANH





Meditation is not imitation, but creation. Meditators who only imitate their instructors can't go far. The same is true of cooking too. A good cook is someone with a creative spirit.You can enter meditation on the interdependence of all phenomena or meditation on the manifestation of all phenomena as interdependent through many different doors -observing your internal organs: blood, heart, intestines, lungs, liver, kidneys; or thousands of other means, including thoughts, feelings, images, poetry , dreams or a river, a star, a leaf and so on. A good practitioner uses meditation throughout daily life, not wasting a single event, to see deeply the nature of dependent co-arising.
Day-long practice is carried out in perfect concentration.With eyes open or closed, the nature of meditation is no other than samadhi. Discard the idea that you must close your eyes to look inside and open them to look outside. A thought is no more an inner object than a mountain an outer one.Both are objects of knowledge.Neither is inner or outer.
Great concentration is achieved when you are fully present, in profound communion with living reality . At these times, the distinction between subject and object disappears and you penetrate living reality with ease, are one with it, because you have set aside all tools for measuring knowledge, knowledge that Buddhism calls `erroneous knowledge'. This kind of meditation can help free us from the concepts of unitydiversity by dissolving the concept of `me'.