..續本文上一頁else or you”ll be understanding them wrongly. The cause of stress will arise in that moment, and you won”t be able to find any way to remedy or escape from it. Your investigation, instead of leading to the discernment that will release you from stress and its cause, will turn into a factory producing stress and its cause at that moment without your realizing it.

　　The way feelings behave is to arise, take a stance, and disband. That”s all there is to them every time. And there”s no ”being,” ”person,” ”our self,” or another to them at all. As soon as we invest them with the ideas of ”being” or ”person,” they will appear in terms of beings and persons, which are the powers giving rise to the cause of stress in that moment, and we”ll immediately be intensifying stress. Meditators should thus use their discernment to be circumspect in dealing with feelings. If you don”t take feelings to be yourself while you are investigating them, all three sorts of feelings will appear clearly as they truly are in line with the principles of the frames of reference and the Noble Truths. No matter how these feelings may change for good or bad, it will be a means of fostering the discernment of the person investigating them each moment they exhibit movement and change. The notions of ”being,” ”person,” ”our self,” or ”another” won”t have an opening by which to slip into these three sorts of feelings at all. There will be just what appears there: feelings as nothing but feelings. No sense of sorrow, discontent, discouragement, infatuation, or pride will be able to arise in any way while these three sorts of feelings are displaying their behavior, because we have come to a proper understanding of them -- and all the time that we as meditators have a proper understanding of feelings while they are arising, we are said to have the contemplation of feelings as a frame of reference in the heart.

　　The mind as a frame of reference is not a level of mind different or apart from the other three frames of reference, which is why it is termed a frame of reference just like the body, feelings, and phenomena. If we were to make a comparison with timber, the mind on this level is like an entire tree, complete with branches, bark, softwood, roots, and rootlets, which is different from the timber put to use to the point where it has become a house. To contemplate the mind as a frame of reference is thus like taking a tree and cutting it up into timber as you want. To investigate the mind on this level, we should focus on the thought-formations of the mind as the target or topic of our investigation, because these are the important factors that will enable us to know the defilement or radiance of the mind. If we don”t know them, then even if the mind suffers defilement and stress all day long, we won”t have any way of knowing. If we want to know the mind, we must first understand the thought-formations that condition the mind in the same way that seasonings give various flavors to food. The fact that the mind displays such an infinite variety of forms, becoming so changed from its original state as to bewilder itself, not knowing the reason and how to cure it, giving in to events with no sense of good or evil, right or wrong, is all because of the thought-formations that condition it.

　　For this reason, the mind as a frame of reference is a mind entangled with its preoccupations and conditioned by its thought-formations. The investigation of thought-formations is thus related to the mind, because they are things interrelated by their very nature. If we understand thought-formations, we will begin to understand the mind, and if we understand the mind, we will understand more about thought-formations -- starting with thought-formations from the blatant to the intermedia…

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