..續本文上一頁e are not caught in thinking and the assumptions of a self, where there is just pure awareness. When you hear the sound of silence, because your mind is just in that state of attention, of pure awareness, there”s no self. You understand, “It”s like this.” Then you can learn to relax into that, to trust it, and not try to hold on to it. It”s tempting to grasp on to the idea: “I”ve got to get the sound of silence and I”ve got to relax into it.” That”s the dodgy part of any kind of technique or instruction.

　　Bhavana (meditation or cultivation) isn”t grasping ideas or coming from any position. Rather, in this patipada, this practice, we recognize and realize through awakened awareness, through direct knowing. When the self starts to break up, some people find it very frightening. Everything you have regarded as solid and real starts falling apart. I remember years ago – long before I was a Buddhist – feeling threatened by certain radical ideas that tended to challenge the security of the world I lived in. At times such as those, it seems that somebody is threatening or challenging something that you depend upon for your sense that everything is all right. You can get very angry and even violent, because they are threatening “my world, my security, my refuge.”

　　You can see why conservative people feel very threatened by foreigners, radical ideas, or anything that comes in and challenges the status quo, because one is depending on that world to make one feel secure. When you are threatened, you panic. Reading about the tragic earthquake in Gujarat, India in January 2001, I was struck with how tenuous our security actually is. The quake just happened out of nowhere. In a town in Gujarat, some schoolgirls were practicing marching on the school ground for a parade, and the merchants were placing their wares out in their shops. Just an average, normal day. Then suddenly, within five minutes the girls were all dead, killed by falling masonry. The whole town of twenty-five thousand people was completely demolished within five minutes. Think what that would do to your mind! It”s frightening to think what a dodgy realm we live in. It seems like a solid and safe environment, then suddenly out of nowhere there”s an earthquake and the whole lot collapses on top of them. Even without earthquakes, we can recognize how easily we can have a heart attack, a brain hemorrhage, be hit by a car, or struck by a plane crashing into our monastery.

　　The conditioned realm that we perceive, create, and hold on to is a very unstable, uncertain, undependable, and changing condition in itself. That”s just the way it is. The Buddha pointed to the instability of conditioned phenomena, to their impermanence. This is not just a philosophy that he was expecting us to go along with. We are asked to explore the nature of the conditioned realm in all the dimensions in which we experience it: the physical, the emotional, and the mental. We take that which is aware of the conditioned realm, sati-sampajanna, awakened awareness, as our refuge, rather than trying to find or create a condition that will give us a false sense of security. We are not trying to fool ourselves, to create a sense of security through positive thinking. Our refuge is awakening to reality, because the unconditioned is reality. Awareness, awakeness, is the gate to the unconditioned. The conditions are whatever they are – strong or weak, pleasant or painful, whatever.

　　“I am an unenlightened person who has to practice meditation hard. I must really work at it, get rid of my defilements, and become an enlightened person some time in the future. I hope to attain stream-entry before I die, but if I don”t, I hope that I will be reborn in a better realm.” We go on like that, creating more and more complication…

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