Wisdom as a Tool
May 09, 2012
We’re fortunate in our practice that we’ve got a lot of good guidance. We’ve got the Buddha’s teachings, the teachings of noble disciples, and of the great ajaans. But even so, as we sit down to meditate, for each of us it’s a process of discovery—in the same way that Columbus discovered America. It wasn’t really lost. A lot of other people knew that America was there, but he didn’t know, and so when he came across it, for him it was a discovery. And it’s the same for us as we sit down to meditate. In one way we’re going over a territory that other people have gone over many, many times before. But for us it’s new. And in that sense we have to learn how to be our own teachers, our own guides. We have to learn how to be our own mainstay.