Honour to the Lord, Arahat, perfectly and completely Enlightened one!
A majority of us use meditation for sensual pleasure. In fact it is for the better of the present situation. When you are stressed and cannot get your head around you sit down for meditation to calm your body. But what we need to understand is that Buddhist meditation is for liberation. There is no middle and there is no other option. It is for liberation only. It is not to be born next to the God or not to be born in heaven. It is to understand the truth of this world and find answers for the suffering.
What is suffering?
A lot of us would ask what suffering is? What we need to realize first is that we cannot see this suffering that is around us. Even the richest person on this earth is suffering for the earthly conditions that are common to everyone such as sickness. Old age, death and even being born is a suffering. Well even in heaven, the Gods or God needs to go through the heavenly conditions. They are normal. That is the nature. In Hinduism they talk about Gods having a fight with the demeans. Meditation leads to the tranquillity of the mind and then the trained mind can be then focused towards the wisdom that will reach the state of Enlightenment.
How does Enlightenment end the suffering?
Well everything starts because of a reason. You are meant to be sick because you are born as a human or a God or a demean. So birth is suffering because we are born we are faced to all these sufferings. But we cannot control our birth. So does sickness, it is suffering and death is suffering too. No one likes to be dead. Enlightenment is the end to suffering because there is no Karma generated for a being to be born again. Simply the sole or what ever you may call it get vanished. The sole has no need to be born anywhere
This is a very deep concept in Buddhism and in order to understand this concept you need to look into it deeply. As Ven. Ajahn Brahmavamso says Buddhism is not a philosophy. Because you cannot attain Nibbana by reading or studying about the concept. You only can attain it by meditating. In this set of articles let me take you though some of the Buddhist meditation techniques.
Buddhist meditation is divided to two parts Samatha or tranquillity and Vipassana or wisdom. Out of these two meditation only Vipassana can take you to NIbbana. Samatha is not only a Buddhist meditation. Some of the Hindu meditation methods are same as Samatha meditation. For new practitioners, Samatha is recommended since it helps to calm your thoughts. Samatha meditation is an important component in meditation since without it a practitioner cannot lead the mind towards Nibbana. once someone trains their mind to calm down then the mind can be directed to look into the true form of everything.
In every practise there are preliminaries that need to be taken into consideration. Even in Buddhist meditation you need to practise these preliminaries that help you to get onto meditation. Remember meditation is not easy but it is very beautiful. It is like going on a holyday and forgetting all the burdens for a while.
Be well!
