..續本文上一頁 the level that it becomes silent awareness of the present in every moment.
You discover, on developing that degree of inner silence, that this is like giving up another great burden. It is as if you have been carrying a big heavy. rucksack on your back for forty or fifty years continuously, and during that time you have wearily trudged through many, many miles. Now you have had the courage and found the wisdom to take that rucksack off and put it on the ground for a while. One feels so immensely relieved, so light, so free, because one is now not burdened with that heavy rucksack of inner chatter.
_Another useful method of developing silent awareness is to recognize the space between thoughts, between periods of inner chatter. Please attend closely with sharp mindfulness when one thought ends and before another thought begins-There! That is silent awareness! It may be only momentary at first, but as you recognize that fleeting silence you become accustomed to it, and as you become accustomed to it then the silence lasts longer. You begin to enjoy the silence, once you have found it at last, and that is why it grows. But remember silence is shy. If silence hears you talking about her, she vanishes immediately!
It would be marvelous for each one of us if we could abandon the inner speech and abide in silent awareness of the present moment long enough to realize how delightful it is. Silence is so much more productive of wisdom and clarity than thinking. When you realize how much more enjoyable and valuable it is to be silent within, then silence becomes more attractive and important to you. The Inner Silence becomes what the mind inclines towards. The mind seeks out silence constantly, to the point where it only thinks if it really has to, only if there is some point to it. Since, at this stage, you have realized that most of our thinking is really pointless anyway, that it gets you nowhere, only giving you many headaches, you gladly and easily spend much time in inner quiet.
The second stage of this meditation, then, is ”silent awareness of the present moment”. You may spend the majority of your time just developing these two stages because if you can get this far then you have gone a long way indeed in your meditation. In that silent awareness of” Just Now” you will experience much peace, joy and consequent wisdom.
If you want to go further, then instead of being silently aware of whatever comes into the mind, you choose silent present moment awareness of just ONE THING. That ONE THING can be the experience of breathing, the idea of loving kindness (Metta), a coloured circle visualised in the mind (Kasina) or several other, less common, focal points for awareness. Here we will describe the silent present moment awareness of the breath, the third stage of the meditation.
Choosing to fix one”s attention on one thing is letting go of persity and moving to its opposite, unity. As the mind begins to unity, sustaining attention on just one thing, the experience of peace, bliss and power increases significantly. You discover here that the persity of consciousness, attending to six different senses-like having six telephones on one”s desk ringing at the same time-is such a burden. Letting go of this persity only permitting one telephone, a private line at that, on one”s desk-is such a relief it generates bliss. The understanding that persity is a burden is crucial to being able to settle on the breath.
If you have developed silent awareness of the present moment carefully for long periods of time, then you will find it quite easy to turn that awareness on to the breath and follow that breath from moment to moment without interruption. This is because the two major obstacles to breath meditation have already been s…
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