[From a teaching on Little Song to Please the Dakinis given by Bardor Tulku Rinpoche in Battle Creek, Michigan on September 22, 2012. Translated by Lama Yeshe Gyamtso. Edited by Matt Willis. All rights reserved. The complete teaching is available as an MP3 download from the KPL Bookstore.]
What we are cultivating in meditation is familiarity with the ordinary mind, the mind that is simply experiencing the present moment directly. That’s all we’re looking for.
So extraordinary experiences, feelings of joy, or tremendous lucidity, or thoughts stopping for a while, and so on, are irrelevant. They’re not what we’re looking for. Craving for them is pointless. Being delighted by them can be destructive because then you seek them, you want them, you try to perpetuate them, and you’re altering the mind. So don’t adopt them.
Apparently negative experiences, such as the presence of turbulent thoughts or turbulent emotions, are not a problem. Abandon disappointment with and rejection of bad experiences. For the same reason so called good experiences are irrelevant, so are bad ones. There’s no need to attempt to get rid of them.