..續本文上一頁sitting in a classroom looking at a blackboard, having a teacher tell me the truth, truth for me was always ”out there”. It took me a while to turn this attitude around.

　　I remember one time in Thailand we had these students visiting the monastery. Ajahn Chah told them very simply, ”Put away your books, and read your minds.” It sounds simple, but how do you do it

　　 We have all learned how to read books since we were very young, but few of us are taught how to read our minds

　　 What mind, who”s reading whose mind

　　 Is my mind reading me, perhaps

　　 But this is what meditation is about. Being able to read one”s mind or read the mind.

　　So, my effort over the years has been to round out or balance out many of my ideas about practice. This means putting them to the test. Of course, putting them to the test means that sometimes we fail. That”s what tests are about. Sometimes you succeed, sometimes you fail. I must admit that in thirty years - I hope this is inspiring - in thirty years I realise that I”ve learned some of my most important lessons from the failures, not from the successes. The successes are secondary; you get a charge from them for a while, but learning from mistakes or failures ... these are really, really important lessons. Of course, who wants to learn from failure

　　 Who wants to even recognise failure, which so threatens our sense of self, our pride and our conceit. But to me, the failures show us our dark side. That”s where we don”t look, we don”t see. To me, enlightenment is not about enlightening the light. The light is already enlightened. Enlightenment is about enlightening the dark, where we don”t look, where we haven”t seen, what we”ve been ignoring. It”s about enlightening our ignorance.

　　It may seem paradoxical, though I hope not disappointing, to say that we can learn most from our mistakes. That”s where we don”t want to look, at our pride and conceit, the foundations of our sense of self - these all become visible in our failures. But success to my mind is possibly even dangerous, because it leads to more conceit and pride. So, the turning round and transformation of the dark side, the losing side, is to me what practice is really about, to learn from all things, especially the things we don”t want to look at, especially the things we don”t think are useful or valuable. This was confirmed for me on this year”s winter retreat.

　　In winter we have three months of monastic retreat. It”s a good time for practice and usually it”s a peaceful and quiet time. But about a month into the retreat this year, I had this little encounter with somebody. Afterwards, I was left with a discomfort; maybe you could call it anger. It wasn”t somebody in the monastery. If it had been somebody in the monastery I could have talked to them and we could have worked it out. It was somebody in a chance encounter I had on a walk, and then they were gone. I couldn”t even chase after them and sort it out. So there I was in the middle of a monastic retreat, no distractions, and there was this thing.

　　I called it ”anger” as a way to deal with it, and this ”anger” just wouldn”t go away. I found it troublesome in the peaceful monastic setting to have this anger nagging at me. But I finally gave in: I realised, ”This is a good chance to learn.”

　　I began to contemplate this irritation, to examine what was going on. It was an unpleasant physical sensation around my heart. As I looked at it, this ”anger” suddenly turned out to be something else: resentment. It surprised me, because the person I was resenting wasn”t even there!

　　It was just a memory, imagination. So I contemplated this resentment for the next two or three days. I found it was resentment at being misunderstood. It went back to something that happened decades ago. I began to look at …

《Rounding Out the Practice》全文未完，請進入下頁繼續閱讀…