When we can see the nature of reality, or the nature of mind, at the very moment
of the appearance of happiness or sadness, we understand it to be unreal, just like
a magical illusion or a dream. If we sustain that insight, mingling formal
contemplation and informal contemplation, then intrinsic awareness of ultimate
buddha, which itself is the inseparability of formal contemplation and informal
contemplation, will abide unchangeably.
In some non-Buddhist schools, the purpose of meditation is to extinguish
consciousness of the five senses of the body, which is like putting thoughts in
prison. Staying in that state for a long time is thought by them to be meditation. It
is considered to be an antidote to suffering, but it provides only temporary relief,
or as mentioned before, it provides merely a change in the kind of suffering. It
does not eradicate pain. We may shake off the leaves of a poison tree and lop off its
branches, but unless the root is severed, the tree will grow back again. So it is with
thoughts.
Some people think that we suffer because of previous karma or because it is the
will of God, and they endure it. Stopping up the five doors of the senses may
temporarily block gross thoughts, but not for long, and it can never be permanent.
In Entering the Way of the Bodhisattva, Shantideva says,
What is momentarily blocked is released again,
Like an unconscious trance.The gods reside in unconscious trance or samadhi for a thousand years, but after
the power of the samadhi is exhausted and the discursive thoughts of the five
poisonous emotions arise again, they are reborn into samsara. Such samadhi is not
permanent happiness. That path is not relevant to those yearning for liberation
and omniscience. Like AIDS patients who take medicine to reduce their fever and
vitamins to strengthen their immune system but who need to address the root of
the disease if they are to be cured, yogins and yoginis may exchange one set of
thoughts for another, more congenial one, but their suffering will not be
eradicated.
Those who think that stopping thought is meditation will be reborn merely in
the realm of the unconscious gods and will attain neither liberation nor
omniscience. Those who stop thoughts and meditate on the nature of a still mind
find it very difficult to apply the antidote to emotions. Consider the life of the
fallen yogin Surya Vajra who after meditating for many years finally seemed to
have achieved his goal only to lose it through attachment to a phantom woman. A
Hindu yogin may sit in the Joyous Samadhi for many years only to awaken from it
and indulge in hatred and plunder of neighboring kingdoms, as we can read in
The Extraordinary Exalted Praise of Totshun Drubje. When a strong intention to
achieve attainment on our own path results in failure to eradicate emotional
afflictions, it probably indicates that stopping thoughts or exchanging one set of
thoughts for another is not an effective antidote to suffering. Whatever suffering
arises is, in Dzogchen nonmeditation, released in its own shoes, like a snake
uncoiling itself, without the need of extraneous assistance.