Namo Tassa Bhagavato Arahato Sammâ-Sambuddhassa. Buddha and his all teaching were always meant for everyone…not to own self only. And sharing of this dhamma post are ...for all beings..you may read, understand, like, share the post (may all be benefited from your sharing) and may you also be merited. Dear Dhamma Friends, Homage to Triple Gems..Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. Now the Dhamma post are on “Now is the knowing” By Most Venerable Ajahn Sumedo. And today it is part IV on Happiness, Unhappiness and Nibbana. I remember one experience I had in my first year of meditation in Thailand. I spent most of that year by myself in a little hut, and the first few months were really terrible all kinds of things kept coming up in my mind — obsessions and fears and terror and hatred. I’d never felt so much hatred. I’d never thought of myself as one who hated people, but during those first few months of meditation it seemed like I hated everybody. I couldn’t think of anything nice about anyone, there was so much aversion coming up into consciousness. Then one afternoon I started having this strange vision — I thought I was going crazy, actually — I saw people walking off my brain. I saw my mother just walk out of my brain and into emptiness, disappear into space. Then my father and my sister followed. I actually saw these visions walking out of my head. I thought, ‘I’m crazy! I’ve gone off!’ — but it wasn’t an unpleasant experience. The next morning when I woke from sleep and looked around, I felt that everything I saw was beautiful. Everything, even the most unbeautiful detail, was beautiful. I was in a state of awe. The hut itself was a crude structure, not beautiful by anyone’s standards, but it looked to me like a palace. The scrubby looking trees outside looked like a most beautiful forest. Sunbeams were streaming through the window onto a plastic dish, and the plastic dish looked beautiful! That sense of beauty stayed with me for about a week, and then reflecting on it I suddenly realized that that’s the way things really are when the mind is clear. Up to that time I’d been looking through a dirty window, and over the years I’d become so used to the scum and dirt on the window that I didn’t realize it was dirty, I’d thought that that’s the way it was. When we get used to looking through a dirty window everything seems grey, grimy and ugly. Meditation is a way of cleaning the window, purifying the mind, allowing things to come up into consciousness and letting them go. Then with the wisdom faculty, the Buddha-wisdom, we observe how things really are. It’s not just attaching to beauty, to purity of mind, but actually understand-ing. It is wisely reflecting on the way nature operates, so that we are no longer deluded by it into creating habits for our life through ignorance. Birth means old age, sickness and death, but that’s to do with your body, it’s not you. Your human body is not really yours. No matter what your particular appearance might be, whether you are healthy or sickly, whether you are beautiful or not beautiful, whether you are black or white or whatever, it’s all non-self. This is what we mean by anatta, that human bodies belong to nature, that they follow the laws of nature: they are born, they grow up, they get old and they die. Now we may understand that rationally, but emotionally there is a very strong attachment to the body. In meditation we begin to see this attach-ment. We don’t take the position that we shouldn’t be attached, saying: ‘The problem with me is that I’m attached to my body. I shouldn’t be. It’s bad, isn’t it? If I was a wise person I wouldn’t be attached to it.’ That’s starting from an ideal again. It’s like trying to start climbing a tree from the top saying, ‘I should be at the top of the tree. I shouldn’t be down here.’ But as much as we’d like to think that we’re at the top, we have to humbly accept that we aren’t. To begin with, we have to be at the trunk of the tree, where the roots are, looking at the most coarse and ordinary things before we can start identifying with anything at the top of the tree. This is the way of wise reflection. It’s not just purifying the mind and then attaching to purity. It’s not just trying to refine consciousness so that we can induce high states of concentration whenever we feel like it, because even the most refined states of sensory consciousness are unsatisfactory, they’re dependent on so many other things. Nibbana is not dependent on any other condition. Conditions of any quality, be they ugly, nasty, beautiful, refined or whatever, arise and pass away — but they don’t interfere with Nibbana, with the peace of the mind. We are not inclining away from the sensory world through aversion, because if we try to anni-hilate the senses then that too becomes a habit that we blindly acquire, trying to get rid of that which we don’t like. That’s why we have to be very patient. This lifetime as a human being is a lifetime of meditation. See the rest of your life as the span of meditation rather than this ten-day retreat. You may think: ‘I meditated for ten days. I thought I was enlightened but somehow when I got home I didn’t feel enlightened any more. I’d like to go back and do a longer retreat where I can feel more enlightened than I did last time. It would be nice to have a higher state of consciousness.’ In fact, the more refined you go the more coarse your daily life must seem. You get high, and then when you get back to the mundane daily routines of life in the city, it’s even worse than before, isn’t it? Having gone so high, the ordinariness of life seems much more ordinary, gross and unpleasant. The way to insight wisdom is not making preferences for refinement over coarseness, but recognizing that both refined and coarse consciousness are impermanent conditions, that they’re unsatisfactory, their nature will never satisfy us, and they’re anatta, they’re not what we are, they’re not ours. Thus the Buddha’s teaching is a very simple one. What could be more simple than ‘what is born must die’? It’s not some great new philosophical discovery, even illiterate tribal people know that. You don’t have to study in university to know it. When we’re young we think: ‘I’ve got so many years left of youth and happiness.’ If we’re beautiful we think, ‘I’m going to be young and beautiful for-ever,’ because it seems that way. If we’re twenty years old, having a good time, life is wonderful and somebody says, ‘You are going to die some day’, we may think, ‘What a depressing person. Let’s not invite him again to our house.’ We don’t want to think about death, we want to think about how wonderful life is, how much pleasure we can get out of it. So as meditators we reflect on getting old and dying. This is not being morbid or sick or depressing, but it’s considering the whole cycle of existence; and when we know that cycle, then we are more careful about how we live. People do horrible things because they don’t reflect on their deaths. They don’t wisely reflect and consider, they just follow their passions and feelings of the moment, trying to get pleasure and then feeling angry and depressed when life doesn’t give them what they want...to be contd.... As informed earlier...I shall be here on Sunday only with dhamma post.
Posted on: Fri, 04 Jul 2014 04:33:10 +0000
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