Peter.
Right.
First question.
I've heard the expression meditate on this as in the problem or issue you're experiencing.
I don't understand the saying.
Please could you explain?
I think the word meditate is quite a useful word.
We don't use the word that often in Pali.
We don't use a word that means meditate.
But meditate means to, in some sense,
fix in the mind so I think the closest Pali word or Pali term would be to set up in the mind with wisdom or means to the root of it to get to the root of the of the object in the mind so it's actually an interesting word means the womb or the seed the very essence of it
Yoniso means to the essence.
Manas means the mind.
Kara, or manasi means in the mind.
Kara means karma, to do.
So set up in the mind at the very root of it.
But it's a general term that means to consider, to mull over.
So Descartes is famous for his book The Meditations.
And
This idea of considering a problem or so on.
So it's a general word that means to consider something or to reflect on something, to try to find an answer to the problem.
I can only, personally can only speak of the meditation, the type of meditation, the type of consideration of an issue or a problem that I'm familiar with and that is really in regards to the meaning of this word Yoni Soma Na Sikara means to set up the essence of the problem in your mind or the essence of the issue and the essence of all issues, all problems, all situations, all experience
All of our lives is a moment-to-moment experience.
It's the moment-to-moment physical and mental states that we're experiencing even now.
When you have an issue with someone, when you're fighting with someone,
The essence of the experience is the physical and mental states that arise and cease.
There's no you, there's no them, there's no problem.
The essence of it is emotions, thoughts, experiences of physical stimuli like hearing when the person's yelling at you, feeling when they're punching you and so on.
Or whatever the situation is.
If you're sick, then there's the feelings associated with the sickness.
And so, from a Buddhist point of view, the answer to your question is, meditating on a problem is to break it down into its constituent parts, break it down into what's really there.
Because this idea of an entity, the idea of a problem, an issue of an entity of some sort,
is an illusion.
It doesn't really exist.
And that's the atomic nature of a problem.
Atomic in the sense that you can't divide it, you can't break it up.
Makes it impossible to remove.
Once it is
then there's nothing you can do about it.
All you can do is run away from it.
The fact that you can solve the problem shows that the problem itself doesn't exist.
There are only the associated states, which can be altered.
When you break it up into the states, you see that there's actually no problem at all.
Because pain is just pain, hearing is just hearing, thinking is just thinking, liking is just liking, disliking is just disliking.
When you meditate in this way, consider the reality.
So when you have pain, you consider it as pain.
You reflect upon it as simply being pain.
So yoniso manasikara means not as me, not as mine, not as good, not as bad.
Not even giving rise to any thoughts about it except that this is pain.
then the problems disappear.
Then you see that there is no problem.
Then you become invincible in any situation.
Whatever problems arise, you can deal with them.
You realize that there is no problem.
When a confrontation arises, you're able to say, well, what is the problem with the confrontation?
When it's yelling at you or hitting you or so on.
It's just pain.
The story of this monk who was...
caught by a tiger.
There were these monks off in the forest, and 30 of them, and they promised that they would practice meditation, meditation together, 30 monks.
And they wouldn't talk to each other, and after 15 days on the Uposatha day, the full moon day, they would come together and meet and do their monastic duties and recite the Dhamma and so on.
After 15 days, only 15 of them came back.
and they're looking around where are the other 15 and they have no idea what happened was every day for 15 days from the empty moon to the full moon this tiger made off with one of the monks
This is the story.
Or tigers, maybe it was more than one.
It's hard to believe that a tiger could eat a human being every day, but something like that.
And so then they made a promise that if someone gets eaten, because what they realized is that every monk who got eaten could have shouted out to the other monks, and they could have come and helped, but they had made a promise not to open their mouths, not to talk to, not to say anything.
So even when they were being caught by the tiger, they refused to open their mouth.
And they said, okay, so now we have to make a rule.
If someone gets caught by a tiger, you have to call us and we'll scare him away.
Same thing happened.
One of the monks was caught by a tiger and they couldn't catch him.
The monk shouted out and they couldn't catch the tiger.
Made off with him.
So what they did is they told the monk just to be mindful.
I said, remember, this is your last chance, just be mindful.
And the story says that he became an arahant, but I'm not sure how anyone would really know that he did become an arahant, but that's the story.
So even in such extreme situations where you have extreme pain, where you're dying, because in the end we all will face the inevitability of death.
In the end we have no choice.
In the end we have to meditate on our problems.
We have to find some way out.
And this is the Buddhist way out, to focus on things as they are.
I don't know if you have anything to add to that.
Yes, there is another aspect, I think, or I experienced on the meditation cushion, that even when you don't have the Yoni Soul Manasikara,
or when you are not considering something but you sit on your meditation cushion in deep meditation in a course or at home then and you have something in your mind or you have had something in your mind which required a solution or an answer or something like that then even without thinking about it when you just
do the meditation practice and observe the rising and the falling of the abdomen and all the other things that could be observed then it might happen that the solution comes by itself or the answer to your question or
yeah what you were thinking about before you meditated finds it answer by itself just by sitting there and not thinking of it