..續本文上一頁u go shoveling food into your mouth, you might end up choking to death. You have to ask yourself: Is it good for me
Can I handle it
Are my teeth strong enough
Some people have nothing but empty gums, and yet they want to eat sugar cane: It”s not normal. Some people, even though their teeth are aching and falling out, still want to eat crunchy foods. So it is with the mind: As soon as it”s just a little bit still, we want to see this, know that — we want to take on more than we can handle. You first have to make sure that your concentration is solidly based, that your discernment and concentration are properly balanced. This point is very important. Your powers of evaluation have to be ripe, your directed thought firm.
Say you have a water buffalo, tie it to a stake, and pound the stake deep into the ground. If your buffalo is strong, it just might walk or run away with the stake, and then it”s all over the place. You have to know your buffalo”s strength. If it”s really strong, pound the stake so that it”s firmly in the ground and keep watch over it. In other words, if you find that the obsessiveness of your thinking is getting out of hand, going beyond the bounds of mental stillness, fix the mind in place and make it extra still — but not so still that you lose track of things. If the mind is too quiet, it”s like being in a daze. You don”t know what”s going on at all. Everything is dark, blotted out. Or else you have good and bad spells, sinking out of sight and then popping up again. This is concentration without directed thought or evaluation, with no sense of judgment: Wrong Concentration.
So you have to be observant. Use your judgment — but don”t let the mind get carried away by its thoughts. Your thinking is something separate. The mind stays with the meditation object. Wherever your thoughts may go spinning, your mind is still firmly based — like holding onto a post and spinning around and around. You can keep on spinning, and yet it doesn”t wear you out. But if you let go of the post and spin around three times, you get dizzy and — Bang! — fall flat on your face. So it is with the mind: If it stays with the singleness of its preoccupation, it can keep thinking and not get tired, not get harmed. Your thinking is cintamaya-pañña; your stillness, bhavanamaya-pañña: they”re right there together. This is the strategy of skillfulness, discernment on the level of concentration practice. Thinking and stillness keep staying together like this. When we practice generosity, it comes under the level of appropriate attention; when we practice virtue, it comes under the level of appropriate attention; and when we practice concentration, we don”t lose a beat — it comes under the same sort of principle, only more advanced: directed thought and evaluation. When you have directed thought and evaluation in charge of the mind, then the more you think, the more solid and sure the mind gets. The more you sit and meditate, the more you think. The mind becomes more and more firm until all the Hindrances (nivarana) fall away. The mind no longer goes looking for concepts. Now it can give rise to knowledge.
The knowledge here isn”t ordinary knowledge. It washes away your old knowledge. You don”t want the knowledge that comes from ordinary thinking and reasoning: Let go of it. You don”t want the knowledge that comes from directed thought and evaluation: Stop. Make the mind quiet. Still. When the mind is still and unhindered, this is the essence of all that”s meritorious and skillful. When your mind is on this level, it isn”t attached to any concepts at all. All the concepts you”ve known — dealing with the world or the Dhamma, however many or few — are washed away. Only when they”re washed away can new knowledge arise.…
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