Meditation is awareness?
Meditation is about increasing your awareness of yourself. Increases awareness 24 hours a day. In the West, we call this “Self-awareness.” This is a very important concept in meditation. Why? This is because we usually have no idea how much we think, how unclear our minds are, or what our health is like right now. As soon as we wake up in the morning, we think about what we have to do and what we will eat. Then we think about what happened yesterday, and worry about how other people see and judge about us. Our mind is always busy.
I sometimes ask my students in the class what they think about meditation and why they want to meditate. Anyone who has ever meditated will tell you that they have too many thoughts and want to reduce them. But for someone who is new to meditation, it is still just a concept. They usually agree that it would be good to meditate because it reduces the thoughts. In fact, they don't realize how much thoughts they have.
As your meditation skills improve through Chan meditation or other meditation techniques, you will naturally begin to become aware of things you should have noticed naturally. It happens quite naturally. For example, I have been broadcasting on the radio at Buddhist Broadcasting Station for the past two and a half years, and the producer in charge of that broadcast was a young woman in her 20s. At first, when I encouraged her to meditate, she responded yes as only a courtesy. After that, she eventually started meditating after my persuasion. The young producer said that she was actually skeptical at first, but she actually sat cross-legged every day and naturally began to notice a lot of unnecessary thoughts. Because the young producer endured the pain by sitting cross-legged every day as instructed, her mind became calmer than before. So, when she returned to her daily life, she would have been buried in countless thoughts like before, but now she was able to gradually recognize the unnecessary thoughts by not responding to them. It's because her thoughts reduced from the meditation practice.
If you've never meditated, you probably don't know that your thoughts may not necessarily be the thoughts you need. You could argue, “I’m smart, I already know!”, but then your chances of progress are slim. This is always relative. When you experience more stress than you can handle, it's only a matter of time before you will become lost or drown in your own thoughts.
So, the most fundamental advantage of meditation is that it makes you aware of your afflictions much faster. The reason meditation is beneficial is because it allows you to recognize unnecessary thoughts more and more quickly. Now that you are aware of your afflictions, all you have to do is find a way to resolve them. That's why if you sit comfortably or lie down and think about what thoughts are positive and good for you, that's not meditation. Trying to figure out in your head what a good idea is, as Westerners do, is not meditation. Thinking about how compassionate and kind you can be to yourself is also not meditation. That's just more delusion.
That's why it's not a good idea to meditate in a comfortable position. Then it becomes too difficult to notice unwanted thoughts. It takes too long. Again, the best meditation method is one that allows you to notice unwanted thoughts faster and faster. Only then can you throw away those thoughts. That's the basics of meditation. Conversely, if it is done properly, it should be very useful to ordinary people as well. This is because it is a systematic training that increases the ability to recognize and eliminate thoughts that cloud our minds, uncomfortable thoughts, unwanted thoughts, and negative thoughts more effectively and quickly.
In conclusion, meditation should make you less afflicted. But for that to happen, you have to start by getting rid of the thoughts that bother you the most. If you go through the process of recognizing and throwing away the thoughts that make you the most unhappy, the ones that give you trouble, and the thoughts that get in the way of what you want to do, you can naturally become a more easy-going, pleasant and productive person.
