The Book of Joy

and obsessive components of these emotions that are destructive.
Meditation is a profound way to develop our ability to escape our fight-
or-flight reflex and extend the pause between stimulus and response to
act with intention rather than just react out of emotion.
“The word ‘meditation’ is quite vast,” explained the Dalai Lama.
“One form of meditation, for example, involves thoughtlessness. When I
pull back the curtains in the morning and I see pigeons on the windowsill,
I really think those pigeons are also doing something similar to this kind
of meditation. They are not asleep but in a state of thoughtlessness. There
is also meditation that involves maintaining focused attention. For
example, for religious believers, single-pointed focus on God is a very
powerful way to meditate and to quiet the mind.
“Now, in my own practice I engage mostly in analytical meditation.
This is a form of mental investigation where you can see your thoughts as
thoughts and learn not to be chained to them, not to identify with them.
You come to recognize that your thoughts do not necessarily reflect the
truth. In analytical meditation, you are constantly asking, What is reality?
What is that self, or ‘I,’ that we hold so dear and that is the focus of so
much of our concern? In analytic meditation, we contemplate on
impermanence and on the transient nature of our existence.
“Some forms of meditation are just trying to create a state of
thoughtlessness. This works like a painkiller, where fear and anger go
away for a short moment but then come back when the meditation ends.
With analytical meditation, we can get to the root cause of the fear or the
anger. We can discover, for example, that ninety percent of our anger is
mental projection. We can discover that the angry words were in the past
and no longer exist, except in our memory. When you think about these
things, the intensity of the anger reduces and you develop your mental
immunity so that anger arises less.
“Many people think that meditation simply means sitting and closing
your eyes,” the Dalai Lama continued, closing his eyes and taking a stiff
posture. “That kind of meditation even my cat can do. He sits there very
calmly purring. If a rat comes by, it has nothing to worry about. We
Tibetans often recite mantras so much, like Om Mani Padme Hum, a