Dhammapada - Buddha Dharma Teachings

The Earth Element

A samadhi meditation for grounding ourselves
By Ajahn Sona

Part 3 of 3

In this practice, this is the sign of success. You will know it when your inner experience, your imagination, your ability to focus becomes much more vivid than you can find in reality simply by looking through your eyes, because now you’re looking through the eyes of the mind.

At this point, your sense of time may drop away, as it does when you’re absolutely enraptured. Think about reading a great book. The book itself is just a bunch of squiggles on a page, isn’t it? But as you read this book, something happens. As you read, you become interested, and then you get a vision and you start to enter a world. I would describe this practice as something like the vivid world that emerges from a book. The book is simply abstract knowledge, abstract signs on a page, but a world appears in your mind. This is the magic of the mind, and when that happens with a book, you lose track of time. You lose the sense of your body. Sometimes three hours can go by when you meant to read for only thirty minutes.

Our bodies are nothing other than the Earth. The Earth enters our body remains, then flows back to the earth.

This is the intensity of absorption. The mind, in this case, is absorbed in a story, something that is meaningful and interesting to you. What we’re going to do with this kasina practice is eliminate the story, and we’re going to eliminate the sequence of ideas, and we’re going to eliminate words themselves. We’re going into another state of rapturous attention, which does not require language. We are reducing our inner activity, reducing that inner voice that is plaguing us all the time.

You’re not thinking anymore, you’re not remembering, you’re not planning, you’re not focusing on the outside world whatsoever. You have withdrawn your senses into your internal world. The body drops into the background. All that is left is the mind-made image of the earth. You merge into this object. No thought of time, no thought of the outside world, just this.

This is a refreshment for the mind and the body, a strengthening of the faculty of attention, which will benefit us in many ways. It’s this focus and attention that ultimately allows us to see deep truths about reality. Without this focus and clarity, we cannot gain wisdom. This is a strengthening exercise for the mind. If we succeed at it, it will also be a treasured respite for the mind, a refuge from the world, a restorative cleansing. The heart will react in a very positive way. Energy increases, clarity increases, awareness increases, wisdom increases, and confidence increases. All these positive things that we appreciate all increase with this simple, profound exercise, with the support of the earth element kasina.

Now you can experiment with this yourself. Practice it over a long sustained period of time to see if it works for you. Don’t expect this to be twenty minutes and done. This is a supernormal activity—if you manage to do this, it’s not normal. You wouldn’t sit down and expect to learn to play the piano in twenty minutes. People devote hours and hours every single day to master skills! Or even golf. I think if I described golf to a 5th-century meditator, they would say, Man, I don’t know what religion you are, but I wouldn’t want to try that; that sounds too obscure to me. But people spend hours, weeks, months, and lots of money in their lives pursuing golf. Why? Because they like it. It captures their interest.

But if you can put your time and interest in meditation, in cultivating samadhi, trust me—it’s better than golf, which is not saying much. It’s better than sports, better than movies. Nt a large portion of the population is going to do this, and not everybody is suitable for this, but if you can do it, it has great rewards. Again, the purpose of this practice is to cultivate samadhi and overcome your psychic irritants, the five hindrances.

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