Happy Vesak!

Today is Vesak, sometimes referred to as "Buddha Day". Among other practices, I'm going vegetarian for the day. I don't believe it's necessary to go 100% vegetarian to be Buddhist (though it's probably a very good idea), but I believe that the human body is built to be omnivorous and that it's probably a good idea to eat what we're structurally set up to eat. I'll also admit that I simply enjoy eating meat, though it may be that this is a weakness for me to overcome.

I was recently reading some articles about meditation, and this seems like a good time to comment on the subject. One question that came up more than once from non-meditators was regarding what exactly meditation is supposed to do for you. As I understand it, several well known authorities have answered that question with "nothing!". It's true that you're not supposed to do it with any expectations, which I think is the reason for that answer. If you do it with expectations, then you're not paying the correct sort of attention and will get nothing out of it, or you're likely to get something not-especially-useful out of it that was shaped by those expectations.

I'll attempt a more practical answer here by example, and it's an answer that some beginners are likely to encounter for themselves. I can always tell when I haven't been getting enough sleep by the way my daily meditation sessions go. It may be that I can function perfectly fine in every other respect, but when I haven't been getting enough sleep, my concentration during my meditation is noticably poor, and I sometimes even experience moments of nodding off just for a second. It's subtle, but it's enough to tell me I'm doing something wrong in my life, so I simply change what I'm doing and move on from there.

So, perfectly rested after having gotten enough sleep, I sit down the following morning to meditate, and other things come into my mind. I consider those thoughts and the meaning of them in the larger context, and notice other things about where I am in life, and hopefully I learn from those things as well. It might have to do with how I'm treating other people (and how they are responding to that), or another problem I'm experiencing with my body, or how I'm spending my time. It might be something less important, like the time a new approach to playing bass guitar came to mind. The point is that whatever issues you've successfully dealt with in your life, there is always something else there the next level down that you may not have noticed, and won't notice until you pay enough attention. And if you haven't dealt with whatever the issue is, it will keep causing trouble for you until you do deal with it.

It's nothing terribly metaphysical; it's just the practice of cultivating the ability to notice things, which is possibly the most useful ability of all. Others may see it differently, but that's what it is for me at this point.