[UMATURLIN]

In my practice, samatha is simply a quality of mind I bring to objects of meditation -- a "purity" or sense of "coolness" that allows the mind to apprehend things as they are: the body as a body, feelings as feelings, consciousness as consciousness, and thoughts (mental objects) as thoughts. In the suttas, this is what is described as "moving beyond craving and discontent with reference to the world." If the mind is agitated with craving and aversion, it will be "hot" with reactivity. We will not be able to bring a peaceful mind to our objects of mindfulness and we will likely get sucked into the workings of the monkey mind and never see beyond our habits.

Ajahn Chah called this "the mind in its normal state" when one has "given up clinging to love and hate." In Zen, this is "beginner's mind" or "ordinary mind." In some of the Mahayana traditions, this is what is hinted at as "bodhicitta" or "the mind inclined towards awakening." In some of the modern-day mindfulness therapies like MBSR or MBCT, this is the quality of nonjudgment that is stressed as a facet of mindfulness. Jon Kabat-Zinn has a very useful concept of the "doing mode of mind" (our habitual quality of mind) and "being mode of mind" (one content simply to let things be as they are).

It's nothing really special. You can experience it as an instantaneous unburdening of the mind when you finally "stop the war" with your inner and outer experience, as Jack Kornfield puts it. It's like opening up the walls of our usually claustrophobic container; there's a sense of untangling the knots we've wound ourselves into without our habits of wanting things to be different than they are. And in stopping the war, in letting go of trying to control your experience, we can experience a moment of pure clarity (vipassana): of seeing our old mental habits from the outside-in, and perhaps learning to traverse and flow through the landscape of our experience rather than getting stuck and hung-up in the places that aren't quite how we wish them to be. Put another way, samatha is "stepping out of the storm." In that stepping out, we naturally gain a new perspective (insight).

However, most people need to "practice" with a fairly neutral object of mindfulness so that they can learn to recognize this quality of mind and learn to trust it because it's quite foreign and unfamiliar, even frightening. It's not so much a case of "first samatha, then vipassana", although it can seem like that because the mind gradually becomes less agitated. Rather, it's a constant "recalibrating" of the mind. When the mind gets "hot" or "muddy", agitated with craving or aversion, we re-establish a nonjudgmental awareness of things as they are, in-the-moment. I think of windshield wipers on a car "cleaning the slate" for the a moment. If the mind drifts, it is because it is trying to cling to or escape from something that has come up. We give that up and bring it back, re-establishing samatha, regaining our calm, "collecting ourselves". In my meditation, I do this again and again. Maybe a hundred times per sitting, but eventually the mind acclimates to this mode and becomes less prone to clinging or running away.