Generally we are distracted from our true selves. Sentient beings are grasping at a false self, the five aggregates. Generally we waste our lives in endless activity.
Meditation, on the other hand, is the way to bring us back to ourselves. Meditation is a basic requirement to make the deluded mind disappear and the true nature appear. In other words, through meditation, one can transcend the habits of mind and directly realize the truth of life. Our lives are lived in intense and anxious struggle, in a swirl of speed and aggression, in competing, grasping, possessing, and achieving, forever burdening ourselves with extraneous activities and preoccupations. Meditation is the exact opposite. To meditate is to make a complete break with how we “normally” operate, for it is a state free of all cares and concerns, in which there is no competition, no desire to possess or grasp at anything, no intense and anxious struggle, and no hunger to achieve: an ambitionless state where there is neither acceptance nor rejection, neither hope nor fear, a state in which we slowly begin to release all those afflictions and attachments, emotions and concepts, that have imprisoned us, into the space of natural simplicity. In reality, the emotions of sentient beings are formations of the various habitual seeds accumulated. Our emotions are impermanent and devoid of intrinsic nature. The Buddhist meditation masters know how flexible and workable the mind is. If we train it, anything is possible. In fact, we are already perfectly trained by and for samsara, trained to get jealous, trained to grasp, trained to be anxious and sad and desperate and greedy, trained to react angrily to whatever provokes us. We are trained, in fact, to such an extent that these negative emotions rise spontaneously, without our even trying to generate them. Sentient beings have been trained for such a long time that the delusions and emotions rise spontaneously, without our even trying to generate them. So everything is a question of training and the power of habit. Devote the mind to karmic habits, and we know only too well, that it will be lazy. Like dreaming, sentient beings are completely trapped in emotions and delusions. All emotions are actually negative energies. Positive energy is free from emotion. It’s pure, compassionate, joyful and wise, different from the emotions such as desire. Desire is affliction and emotion. Sentient beings often misunderstand secular love as beautiful, which is actually the beginning of depravity. With desire, one will have hatred and emotion. After being caught up in desire, hatred and attachment for a long time, the mind will gradually become dumb and ignorant. When you’re grasping at something, you’re scared of losing it, and you tend to generate other negative emotions such as doubt and jealousy. All the other negative emotions are results of desire. Desire is the root of the three kinds of sufferings – the suffering of suffering, the suffering of change, and all-pervasive suffering, which you should have learnt. There are many knots in the mind, all created by itself. However, the mind is unaware, and doesn’t know how to untie them; rather, it continues to tie new knots upon existing ones. Devote it in meditation to the task of freeing itself from the innumerable knots and all kinds of karmic habits such as greed and hatred. We will find that, with time, patience, discipline, and the right training, our mind will begin to unknot itself and know its essential bliss and clarity.