Life is like a game of snakes and ladders

Come to think of it, life is certainly like a game of Snakes and Ladders. I remember well when I was a kid we used to play a board game called "Snakes and Ladders". The goal of this game was to get to the top of the tallest ladder without being swalloed by the snake. The problem was that after you have been lucky enough to climb the tallest ladder, there was a bigger snake waiting at the top of this tallest ladder waiting to swallow you and back to the bottom you would go.

So what has this game got to do with life. The way I see it, humans and I would venture to say all beings are facing different kinds of temptations every day. We humans are creatures who are being stimulated by the Five Senses. Buddha taught his disciples that there were more than five senses. He said there were six senses. The eye, ear, nose, tongue, body made up the five senses. Buddha added a sixth which he said was the "mind". If we look at all our senses as "doors", the mind could be called the "mind door". This was indeed true. Sometimes our mind is putting in a lot of inputs of its own. If I were to use an analogy from the world of computers, all our six senses are "doors" from which various "stimuli" can enter.

As part of their spiritual training, the Buddha and many meditation teachers who went before him taught the importance of concentration of the mind and training of the mind. If we took time to read about the life of Buddha, we would find to our surprise that the Buddha did not emerge as a fully enlightened "Buddha" over night. After he left his queen, son and his father's kingdom, the young prince Siddarhta roamed about in seach of capable teachers. He met the best of the teachers he could find. The two teachers he found were saintly men who lived in the forest and taught meditation and ways of training the mind. My point in re-telling this story is to emphasize the need for concentrating the mind and training the mind and that various techniques were already in existence for training the mind.

At that time there were various schools of thought. Some believed that the Five Senses were the cause of the problem for humans. So these meditation masters taught their students to control their senses and to stay away from anything or anyone that would detract them from their object of meditation. The meditation practitioner had to sit down, preferably in a cross-legged position, close his or her eyes and concentate on a certain meditation object.

Some meditation teachers taught that the "eye" was the problem and that it was from seeing beautiful things that a person gets attached to such a beautfiful object. They tried to solve this problem by "taking out" the eye. The eye was literally taken out from its socket.

The young price Siddarhta finally left these teachers who were teaching extreme paths. He later found out that there was nothing wrong with having the six senses. The main thing was to be able to control our mind when we "see" or "hear" or "touch" or "smell" or "taste" or "imagine".

Thus, when he found the "Middle Path" which was called the "Majima Padipada" in Pali, he taught his disciples to follow the middle path and to seek "knowledge" and "wisdom" through insight meditation.

He emphasized to his disciples that the object of doing meditation was not to torture oneself by sitting in one place for a long time. In fact he said it was necessary to balance the various postures while we did meditation. Thus he said the meditation practitioner could assume all the postures of sitting, standing, walking or lying down. The main thing, he said was to "purify" the mind gradually without any anxiety or eagerness to get to "this level" or "that level".

The main thing, he said, again and again was to get to the root of attachment to sensual objects.

The peace of nivarna happens when the meditation practitioner realizes " a thought moment of detachment".

Nivarna in other words is "the absence of clinging". Clinging in other words is "attachment".

So the thing I wish to say in this posting is this. We can train ourselves to resist temptation if we do insight meditation on a regular basis. Enlightenment does not come with a "big bang" one fine morning. Instead, the small "ah ha" moments that we encounter lead us to our spiritual goal every time we gain an insight of various aspects of our human existence.