Meditation - the Art of Returning

"Trying to push thoughts away will not work, just observe the passing thoughts, senses, sounds, let them go and keep returning to your breath. Meditation is the art of returning! Whatever you resist persists.                        Ron Alexander

 

There are some people who say that the way to meditate on emptiness is simply to empty our mind of all conceptual thoughts, arguing that just as white clouds obscure the sun as much as black clouds, so positive conceptual thoughts obscure our mind as much as negative conceptual thoughts. This view is completely mistaken, for if we make no effort to gain a conceptual understanding of emptiness, but... try instead to suppress all conceptual thoughts, actual emptiness will never appear to our mind. We may achieve a vivid experience of a space-like vacuity, but this is just the absence of conceptual thought – it is not emptiness, the true nature of phenomena. Meditation on this vacuity may temporarily calm our mind, but it will never destroy our delusions nor liberate us from samsara and its sufferings. ~ p. 115 (Modern Buddhism)

It is only when we silent the blaring sounds of our daily existence
that we can finally hear the whispers of truth that life reveals to
us, as it stands knocking on the doorsteps of our hearts.

  ~K.T. Jong