The Vipassana Retreat

　　5. Working with Thinking and Pain in Meditation

　　At the beginning of the practice at least, a lot of meditators are much troubled by their thoughts as well as painful body sensations. Pain from the sitting posture is workable, as the cause comes from not being accustomed to the crossed legged sitting posture. Thinking is more of a challenge, as it requires patience and skill to come to terms with it.

　　Meditators are likely to assume that somehow they must get rid of the thoughts or block them out to be successful in meditation. This might be the case in concentration-based meditation, where the one-pointed concentration on the meditation object will eventually suppress the thinking process to produce a state of calm. But in Vipassana meditation we do not want to suppress the thinking merely to get some relief from the turbulence in the mind. Rather we seek to insight into the nature of the mind and to the thinking process itself.

　　Thinking by its nature cannot be exactly aligned with the present moment experience. It can describe it but the description can never be the actual experience. Thinking is mostly either of the past or a projection into the future. Thinking creates ideas, plans, concepts, or opinions produced by mental activities. It is a symbolic, not an ultimate reality. It does not lead to the primary experience, that is, direct experiential knowing.

　　The strategy in working with thinking in Vipassana meditation is to first allow it to be, not getting into struggle with it, and to regard it as just another object to be noted. In time, one becomes skilled in witnessing the thinking process without becoming involved so much in the content of the mind. It is like standing on the pavement passively aware of the traffic going by without reacting to the passing traffic itself; until eventually the mind is quiet or at least it quietens down somewhat. Then the naturally quiet or silent mind opens to the direct experience of the phenomena under observation.

　　To have the truly ”stilled mind” is not so easy, for again and again the meditator finds himself or herself ”lost in thought”, only catching the thinking retrospectively. Patience and perseverance is called for in this situation. Be assured in time that the trains of thoughts will slow down sufficiently so that you will start to notice gaps or pauses in the thoughts.

　　So by being aware, even just occasionally, of the gaps in the thinking, there is an opening to be able, as it were, to catch the next thought as it is forming, that is the beginning of the thought. This acts as a circuit breaker. The circuit is broken and the mind has quietened and one”s attention is able to resume noting the primary object. At this level the mind has quietened sufficiently to just know, that is, the mind knowing the mind.

　　In the short term, there is another way to work with circuitous thinking using ”skillful means”. That is, using the mental noting of ”thinking”,” thinking”, “thinking” to cut the incessant thinking. But it has to be done vigorously otherwise one can find one has drifted off thinking about the nature of thought! The mental noting of thinking can be a powerful tool to inhibit the thinking, but has to be used judiciously.

　　There is a saying: "Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional".

　　Understandably, meditators want the unpleasant feeling or pain they are experiencing in the practice to go away. The underlying assumption is that by bearing the pain it will go away and then they will feel good, and without the pain they will have pleasant experiences as a reward for their effort. Actually, in Vipassana meditation we do the opposite: that is, we are trying to understand the nature of pain and to investigate the so-called pain - not to get rid of it.…

《The Vipassana Retreat: 5· Working with Thinking and Pain in Meditation》全文未完，請進入下頁繼續閱讀…