..續本文上一頁times it remains in contact with this body. And with this contact a sensation keeps arising. You feel a sensation that you label as pleasant, and you keep reacting. At the depth of your mind you keep reacting with craving or aversion. You keep on generating different types of saṇkhāras, negativities, impurities, and the process of multiplying your misery continues. You can”t stop it because there is such a big barrier between the conscious and the unconscious mind. Without the practice of Vipassana, this barrier remains.
At the conscious, intellectual level of the mind, one may accept the entire theory of Dhamma, truth, law, nature. But still one keeps rolling in misery because one does not realize what is happening at the depth of the mind. But with Vipassana your mind becomes very sharp and sensitive so that you can feel sensations throughout the body. Sensations occur every moment. Every contact results in a sensation: in Pali, phassa paccayā vedanā. This is not a philosophy; it is the scientific truth which can be verified by one and all.
The moment there is a contact, there is bound to be a sensation; and every moment, the mind is in contact with matter throughout the physical structure. The deeper level of the mind keeps feeling these sensations, and it keeps reacting to them. But on the surface the mind keeps itself busy with outside objects, or it remains involved in games of intellectualization, imagination, or emotion. Therefore you do not feel what is happening at the deeper level of the mind.
By Vipassana, when that barrier is broken, one starts feeling sensations throughout the body, not merely at the surface level but also deep inside. By observing these sensations, you start realizing their characteristic of arising and passing, udaya-vyaya. By this understanding, you start to change the habit pattern of the mind.
Say, for example, you are feeling a particular sensation that may be caused by the food you have eaten, the atmosphere around you, your present mental actions, or old reactions that are now giving their fruit. Whatever the cause may be, a sensation has occurred. With your training in Vipassana, you observe it with equanimity, without reacting to it. In those few wonderful moments, you have started changing the habit pattern of your mind by observing sensation and understanding its nature of impermanence. You have stopped the blind habit pattern of reacting to the sensation and multiplying your misery. Initially you may be able to do this only for a few seconds or minutes. But by practice, you gradually develop your strength. As the habit pattern becomes weaker, your behaviour pattern changes. You are coming out of your misery.
When we talk of addiction, it is not merely to alcohol or to drugs, but also to passion, anger, fear or egotism. All these are addictions to your impurities. At the intellectual level you may understand very well, "Anger is not good for me. It is dangerous. It is harmful." Yet you are addicted to anger, and keep generating it. And when the anger is over, you keep repeating, "Oh! I should not have generated anger. I should not have generated anger." Yet the next time a stimulus comes, you again become angry. You are not coming out of anger, because you have not been working at the depth of your mind.
By practising this technique, you start observing the sensation that arises because of the biochemical flow when you are angry. You observe but do not react to it. That means you do not generate anger at that particular moment. This one moment turns into a few minutes, and you find that you are not as easily influenced by this flow as you were in the past. You have slowly started coming out of your anger.
Those who regularly practise this technique try to observe how they are…
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