..續本文上一頁come up: “Well, this is boring. What”s next

　　” So say, “No. Who”s bored

　　 Who”s saying that

　　” Start questioning those thoughts. Don”t believe everything that comes through your head. Don”t believe everything you think. Just see the thought as an energy pattern that comes and goes. You don”t have to give it any more reality than that. You don”t have to give it any more credence than that. Learn to be on the lookout for any kind of thought that pushes you away from the present moment. Instead of getting entangled with it, just allow it to dissolve while you stay with the breath.

　　You begin to see that you can start anticipating when a thought is going to arise. You feel it as a stirring, a disturbance in the energy field of the body. Just allow that sense of disturbance to relax, allow it to iron itself out, and the thought will get aborted. This way you don”t have to engage in a conversation with every thought that comes into the mind. Just take the thought apart before it forms and that makes it a lot easier to stay here for long periods of time.

　　As you stay here longer and longer, one, the mind gets stronger, your awareness of the present moment gets stronger, the sense of wellbeing of the body gets stronger, goes deeper; and, two, you start seeing and understanding patterns of the mind that you never saw or understood before. This is where the practice starts giving rise to insight, where you start actually using your meditation.

　　Ajaan Fuang, my teacher, once said that there are three steps to meditation: one is learning how to do it, in other words how to get the mind to settle down; the second step is learning how to maintain it, how to keep it there; and the third is learning how to put it to use. What good is a centered mind, this state of wellbeing, this state of centeredness that we”ve got here

　　 Well, in addition to giving a sense of wellbeing in the body, it helps you to understand what”s going on in the mind. You can learn how to sidestep a lot of the emotions that used to take over. You see them as a process that arises and falls away within this larger field of awareness you”re developing. That way they don”t sneak up on you from behind to take over your awareness. You see them as they come and you have a sense of which thoughts are worth thinking, which ones are not. You can disarm the thoughts that aren”t helpful and engage only the ones that really are worth thinking about. And you get a quicker and quicker at sensing which is which, which ones lead to happiness and which ones will lead to suffering. You can start undercutting the ones that lead to suffering, step by step by step. You gain more control of the mind and see exactly where it”s getting in the way of the happiness you”re trying to find here in the present moment.

　　You begin to realize that the big problem is not the things that come from outside. It”s what the mind does to itself, the ways it forces itself to think, the ways it ties itself down to ideas and attitudes that cause stress, suffering, and pain. When you stop getting engaged in those patterns, you find a sense of happiness, a sense of wellbeing that lies deeper still, even deeper than the sense of concentration. This gets you closer and closer to the kind of happiness that the Buddha was talking about, a happiness that doesn”t depend on conditions. There will come a point in the meditation when things open up, where at that point you”re not doing anything more, just simply allowing these things to open up on their own. And you finally reach a dimension in the mind that, as the Buddha said, is not conditioned, that doesn”t depend on anything at all. That”s where the true happiness lies.

　　So this process here is one of digging in, looking for gold, and when you find things that are obviously not gold you throw them away. When things look like gold you have to test them, because there”s fools gold, you know. But the basic test is this: Is it something that”s constant or inconstant

　　 If it”s inconstant you know it”s going to be stressful, nothing you want to identify with. No matter how much you”ve cherished a particular type of thinking or sense of your own identity, you begin to realize how those things get in the way of true happiness. You”re finally willing to let them go.

　　So use this test for gold to check everything out. As you run into things that are fools gold you put them aside; more things that are fools gold, put them aside. As you put them aside, things open up, there is less getting in the way.

　　The genuine gold is already there, it”s just a question of not being willing to settle for anything less.

《A True Happiness》全文閱讀結束。