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 todays Dhamma post are on “Now is the knowing” By Most Venerable Ajahn Sumedo. Continuation from Aanapana sati (The Meditation) PART III If we read books about not putting any effort into things, just letting everything happen in a natural, spontaneous way, then we tend to start thinking that all we have to do is lounge about — and then we lapse into a dull passive state. In my own practice, when I lapsed into dull states I came to see the importance of putting effort into physical posture. I saw that there was no point in making effort in a merely passive way. I would pull the body up straight, push out the chest and put energy into the sitting posture; or else I would do head stands or shoulder stands. Even though in the early days I didn’t have a tremendous amount of energy, I still managed to do something requiring effort. I would learn to sustain it for a few seconds and then I would lose it again, but that was better than doing nothing at all. The more we take the easy way, the path of least resistance — the more we just follow our desires, the more the mind becomes sloppy, heedless and confused. It is easy to think, easier to sit and think all the time than not to think — it is a habit we’ve acquired. Even the thought, ‘I shouldn’t think,’ is just another thought. To avoid thought we have to be mindful of it, to put forth effort by watching and listening, by being attentive to the flow in our minds. Rather than thinking about our mind, we watch it. Rather than just getting caught in thoughts, we keep recognizing them. Thought is movement, it is energy, it comes and goes, it is not a permanent condition of the mind. Without evaluating or analysing, when we simply recognize thought as thought, it begins to slow down and stop. This isn’t annihilation, this is allowing things to cease. It is compassion. As the habitual obsessive thinking begins to fade, great spaces we never knew were there begin to appear. We are slowing everything down by absorbing into the natural breath, calming the kammic formations, and this is what we mean by samatha or tranquillity: coming to a point of calm. The mind becomes malleable, supple and flexible, and the breathing can become very fine. But we only carry the samatha practice to the point of upacara samadhi [approaching concentration], we don’t try to completely absorb into the object and enter jhana. At this point we are still aware of both the object and its periphery. The extreme kinds of mental agitation have diminished considerably, but we can still operate using wisdom. With our wisdom faculty still functioning, we investigate, and this is vipassana — looking into and seeing the nature of whatever we experience: its impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and imperson-ality. Anicca, dukkha and anatta are not concepts we believe in, but things we can observe. We investigate the beginning of an inhalation and its ending. We observe what a beginning is, not thinking about what it is, but observing, aware with bare attention at the beginning of an inhalation and its end. The body breathes all on its own: the in-breath conditions the out-breath and the out-breath conditions the in-breath, we can’t control anything. Breathing belongs to nature, it doesn’t belong to us — it is not-self. When we see this we are doing vipassana. The sort of knowledge we gain from Buddhist meditation is humbling — Ajahn Chah calls it the earth-worm knowledge — it doesn’t make you arrogant, it doesn’t puff you up, it doesn’t make you feel that you are anything, or that you have attained anything. In worldly terms, this practice doesn’t seem very important or necessary. Nobody is ever going to write a newspaper headline: ‘At eight o’clock this evening Venerable Sumedho had an inhalation!, To some people, thinking about how to solve all the world’s problems might seem very important, how to help all the people in the Third World, how to set the world right. Compared with these things, watching our breath seems insignificant, and most people think, ‘Why waste time doing that?’ People have confronted me about this, saying: ‘What are you monks doing sitting there? What are you doing to help humanity? You’re just selfish, you expect people to give you food while you just sit there and watch your breath. You’re running away from the real world.’ But what is the real world? Who is really running away, and from what? What is there to face? We find that what people call the ‘real world’ is the world they believe in, the world that they are committed to or the world that they know and are familiar with. But that world is a condition of mind. Meditation is actually confronting the real world, recognizing and acknowledging it as it really is, rather than believing in it or justifying it or trying to mentally annihilate it. Now the real world operates on the same pattern of arising and passing as the breath. We’re not theorizing about the nature of things, taking philosophical ideas from others and trying to rationalize with them, but by watching our breath we’re actually observing the way nature is. When we’re watching our breath we’re actually watching nature; through understanding the nature of the breath, we can understand the nature of all conditioned phenomena. If we tried to understand all conditioned phenomena in their infinite variety, quality, different time span and so on, it would be too complex, our minds wouldn’t be able to handle it. We have to learn from simplicity. So with a tranquil mind we become aware of the cyclical pattern, we see that all that arises passes away. That cycle is what is called samsara, the wheel of birth and death. We observe the samsaric cycle of the breath. We inhale and then we exhale: we can’t have only inhalations or only exhalations, the one conditions the other. It would be absurd to think: ‘I only want to inhale. I don’t want to exhale. I’m giving up exhalation. My life will be just one constant inhalation’ — that would be absolutely ridiculous. If I said that to you, you’d think I was crazy; but that is what most people do…to be contd.
Posted on: Sun, 29 Jun 2014 03:43:12 +0000
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