..续本文上一页ioned attitude, "I am this person, I am this personality, I am Ajahn Sumedho... I am all kinds of things... I should be and I shouldn”t be." But the aim of Buddhist meditation is about changing one”s attitude by using the reflective or intuitive function of the mind.

　　When we go into the stillness of meditation, often times the sense of oneself will take us over, we”ll be filled with all kinds of memories and ideas about ourselves. We sometimes wish that... "if I go and meditate then I”ll go into stillness and I”ll get out of this ugly scenario of myself." Sometimes the mind will suddenly just stop and we”ll experience a kind of bliss, or a peace that we have either forgotten or never really noticed before. But the sense of oneself will still operate because of the force of habit. So we develop an attitude of listening to this self, not in terms of believing or disbelieving but in noticing what it really is that arises and ceases. Whether we think of ourselves as the greatest or the worst doesn”t matter, the condition itself comes and goes. Through letting go or `self-naughting”, not trying to get rid of it but allowing it to go, then we begin to experience the true nature of mind which is bliss, silence.

　　So there are moments in our lives when the self does stop functioning and we get in touch with the pure state of conscious experience. That is what we call bliss. But when we have those blissful experiences, immediately the desire to have them again takes over, and no matter how hard we try to have it again, as long as we”re attached to the view of wanting bliss again, we will never get it. It doesn”t work that way. Wanting it means that we have already made it impossible, so the attitude then is one of letting go of desire. Not trying to suppress desire, because that is another kind of desire: the desire to get rid of desire is still the same problem. So if we”re trying to suppress or annihilate desire, it doesn”t work. Nor does just following desire. But in this state of attentive awareness, we begin to see what is actually taking place, then we can let go of the causes of our suffering. We see how it actually is, and we have that intuitive wisdom to let go. So in this life as a human being from birth to death every moment is an opportunity for understanding in the right way. Success or failure suddenly doesn”t mean anything because even if we fail, we learn from that. This doesn”t mean that we don”t try or put ourselves forth but that our aim is no longer to succeed but to understand things.

　　It takes a long time to get underneath this self view because it is an all pervasive influence on our conscious experience. With meditation also, we bring attention to very ordinary things like the breath and the body, and so we learn how to bring our attention into the present moment, to sustain our attention rather than be caught up in trying to become something, or trying to get something out of our practice. This `trying to get something” doesn”t work because whatever we get we are going to lose; so if you feel you”ve got samadhi that means you are going to lose it also. When we go on a very formal quiet meditation retreat, we can get into a blissful state. But then when the retreat ends, we lose it. This doesn”t mean to dismiss retreats but to try to look at these opportunities, not from the worldly, self-centred position any more but from observing how things are when we remove sensory stimulation, or when we get out of the sensory deprivation tank and walk out into the street, with the traffic noises, the pollution, and people rushing by - we can feel even worse than before because now we have become refined and the coarse world is too unbearable. But if we contemplate in the right way, we see the sensory deprivation or the sensory stimulation as `the way it is”. Then it doesn”t stir up or aggravate the senses and we”re more or less in touch with the mind that is blissful. It”s always present: but when we”re caught in irritation and agitation, we don”t notice it.

　　So the Buddhist approach to this, rather than going off and living in a sensory deprivation tank, or becoming a hermit, is to develop that awareness, because through mindfulness we begin to realise that the pure nature of the mind is always with us, even now. Even though we might be agitated or irritated, if we are mindful we”ll experience a natural bliss beyond that. And once we realise that for ourselves, then we know how not to suffer. The end of suffering is in seeing things as they really are, so that our refuge isn”t in this reactive excited condition of the eyes and the ears and the nose, the tongue, the body, the brain, the emotions. In these are the conditions that are irritating, agitated. Through mindfulness we realise that which transcends these conditions. That is our real refuge. This we can realise as human beings through wise contemplation of our own personal predicament.

《Self and Self-Naughting》全文阅读结束。