Self-Observation and Self-Correction

　　- by S. N. Goenka

　　(Goenkaji came to North Rehabilitation Facility (NRF) in Seattle, Washington in the summer of 2002 during his North American tour. He met the course students and others on mettā day and later addressed the Day 11 assembly gathered for the last men”s course to be held there. His address has been edited and adapted for the Newsletter.)

　　Friends, I am so glad to be here with you all this morning. You have given this technique a good trial and you have received good results. Now you have to maintain the practice, and apply it in day-to-day life. Merely taking a course of ten days is not sufficient although it is very important. You learned the technique by practicing under an experienced guide. Now, applying it in life is very important. Nobody else can correct you; you have to correct yourself; you have to develop self-awareness. Keep examining yourself; keep correcting yourself.

　　You have two great friends to help you. One friend is your own respiration and the other is sensations on your body. More and more, as you become established in this technique, these two friends will be there to help you throughout your life. Whenever the mind becomes unbalanced with some negativity, you will notice that your breath loses its normality. It will be slightly hard, slightly fast. It is giving you a warning, "Look, something is wrong in your mind!" And you will try to make your mind more balanced.

　　The second good guide and friend is your sensations, physical sensations, which you have learned about in these ten days. Whenever you find you are generating any negativity, it will become so clear that you are the first victim of your negativity. As soon as you generate anger, hatred, illwill, animosity, being a good Vipassana meditator, you will notice there is a burning sensation throughout the body. The heartbeat increases, tensions build up. Misery! "Look, I am making myself miserable!"

　　Immediately, you start observing the sensations, observing the breath, with equanimity. You try to maintain perfect balance of the mind, perfect equilibrium of the mind, and you find that you are coming out of the negativity. Your mind becomes purer and purer, and the law of nature is such that when the mind is pure it becomes full of love, compassion, goodwill, tolerance. These qualities will arise, provided the purity of mind is maintained.

　　Not that in ten days, you will become so perfect that there will be no more defilements. Oh no! The old habit patterns are still there, they continue to arise, but now you have a technique that will help you to come out of them. Don”t allow them to multiply and overpower you. When you are unaware of what is happening deep inside you will only see things happening outside: "Someone has insulted me." That thought becomes predominant in your mind, and you keep thinking, "So and so has insulted me; that”s why I am generating anger."

　　You generate anger to retaliate, to take revenge, to harm this person without understanding that you have started harming yourself. You can”t harm anybody without first harming yourself. You have to generate some defilement or other in your mind to harm somebody and whenever you generate any defilement in the mind, say anger, hatred, illwill, passion, fear, ego, then you become miserable. You don”t want to harm yourself. And yet, out of ignorance, without knowing what is happening at the depth of the mind, you keep generating impurity after impurity, defilement after defilement, more and more anger, hatred, jealousy, ego. And the sensations that you get at that time make you feel very miserable.

　　Before learning Vipassana, you used to react in a certain way in a situation. Now, a similar situation has arisen, ask yourself, "Am I reacti…

《Self-Observation and Self-Correction》全文未完，請進入下頁繼續閱讀…