06/02/2026
Starting with basic shamatha and vipashyana
There are different levels of awareness, or consciousness, or mind. The one we should start with, in a way, is just the ordinary consciousness of being aware of our breath. So we're paying attention to the breathing process, and we're using the breath as the object of awareness. You want to see how the mind pays attention to an object and how the object helps refine the mind.
So if we start from the idea of just awareness, it gets too spacey. We want to start from the fact that mind--or attention, or knowing -- is always going to have an object that it knows.
Now at some point, we could be talking about big-A Awareness. We shouldn't start there. Because if we start with big-A Awareness, we could already say there's no subject or object. So by definition it doesn't even make sense to say, "Is it inside or outside?" But when we're talking like this, it tends to be very conceptual. It becomes kind of ungrounded.
So in starting with basic shamatha and vipashyana, we're actually starting with the world of subject and object, and we're investigating how it works from that standpoint.
That probably brings up just as many questions, but it's asking the right questions.
- Lama Jinpa Rinpoche
