..续本文上一页in just being the listener, the watcher, rather than being somebody trying to meditate to get some kind of result.

　　When we emphasise our personality we create problems, because the personal qualities are different for each one of us. We have our common human problems: old age, sickness and death; all men have certain things in common; all women have certain conditions in common. But then there are certain attitudes, cultural expectations and

　　assumptions, which are conditioned into the mind, instilled into us after we are born. Through mindfulness, we are able to get beyond this conditioning of the mind to the pure consciousness that isn”t conditioned, but which is like the background, the emptiness, the blank sheet on which words are written. Our perceptions arise and cease on that blank sheet, that emptiness.

　　So contemplate this. As we begin to listen and watch more, rather than just trying to get some samadhi or concentrated states that we read about in books; as we relax, and watch and listen then we have a much greater possibility of experiencing that emptiness. We use words like relinquishment and abandonment which can sound very heavy to the worldly mind, but it”s not a heavy act of annihilation or destruction. Rather, it”s a willingness to let things go, to allow things to be what they are, to let them cease - not holding on or identifying with anything, but just trusting in that pure state of aware attentiveness in the present moment.

　　One of the big delusions that we have in regard to meditation is that it is something I am doing, something I have got to do. We follow the guidelines with the idea of attaining and achieving different levels of realisation, like getting a university degree. It is interesting to see how some of the Westerners who become monks or nuns within the Theravadan tradition can be very intelligent and well educated, but because of the way that their minds have been conditioned they tend always to interpret the Holy life in terms of personal attainment - of becoming somebody special.

　　There is a rule within our monastic tradition that prohibits us from going around announcing our attainments. But in Thailand, everyone said that Ajahn Chah was an arahant - though he never said so. Then people would see him smoking a cigarette, and they”d think, "Arahants wouldn”t smoke cigarettes, he couldn”t be an arahant!" The conditioned mind tends to hold on to a fixed idea of an arahant as an absolutely, totally

　　refined, goody-good person who”d never do anything coarse, but is always perfect in what they say and how they live. We want them to be perfect, according to our idea, so when we see any kind of flaw we become critical, disappointed, disillusioned and doubtful about them.

　　But this is a function of our mind. We are creating our own arahants, and therefore whatever we create in our own mind can easily become the opposite. What we can do is to observe this whole process of projection; of our creation of an ideal person, the ideal teacher. We begin to see how it is just an ideal. The perfect ideal is always the same, like a marble image. If, say, a teacher does something which is totally opposite to what we think should be done, to what we imagine is perfect, we can feel quite upset or disappointed. So we may feel that somehow we have to deal with it, to justify it: "He can behave like that because he is an enlightened being." We are willing to overlook crude or bad manners, or worse than that; we won”t allow doubt to arise in our mind with regard to that person. Or, at the other extreme, we think: "That person is a bad person, they couldn”t be enlightened." We dismiss them. But if we keep to this practice of mindfulness, we see that it”s not really up to us to make a categorical moral judgement about oth…

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