Book title: Mindfulness, Bliss, And Beyond
By Ajahn Brahm
Publisher: Wisdom Publications Boston
ISBN: 0-86171-275-7
To know where your effort should be directed in meditation, you must have a clear understanding of the goal. The goal of this meditation is beautiful silence, stillness, and clarity of mind. If you can understand that goal, then the place to apply your effort and the means to achieve the goal become much clearer. The effort is directed to letting go, to developing a mind that inclines to abandoning. One of the many simple but profound statements of the Buddha is that ‘a meditator who makes letting go the main object easily achieves samādhi,’ that is, attentive stillness, the goal of meditation (SN, 48,9). Such a meditator gains these states of inner bliss almost automatically. The Buddha was saying that the major cause for attaining deep meditation and reaching these powerful states is the ability to abandon, to let go, to renounce.
