Levels of the Breath
August 20, 2006
We all bring our stories to the meditation. Sometimes they’re helpful stories, sometimes they’re not. Even the Buddha brought his stories to the meditation. That first knowledge on the night of his awakening was basically his story stretching back over many lifetimes. The big issues in each lifetime were his name, his appearance, his food, his experience of pleasure and pain, and how he passed away. That’s pretty much it. The life of living beings: name, appearance, food, pleasure, pain, death. Not much of a story. And yet we can elaborate these things into all kinds of issues and spend whole lives going over the details, certain incidents in the stories, especially the painful ones. Or we can look back on the pleasures we once had but that we’re missing now, which can turn those past pleasures into present pain.