..续本文上一页In England people tend to suppress sorrow when somebody dies. They try not to cry or be emotional, they don”t want to make a scene, they “keep a stiff upper lip”. Then when they start meditating they can find themselves suddenly crying over the death of someone who died fifteen years before. They didn”t cry at the time, so they end up doing it fifteen years later. When someone dies, we don”t want to admit the sorrow or make a scene because we think that if we cry we”re weak, or it”s embarrassing to others. So we tend to suppress and hold things back, not recognizing the nature of things as they really are, not recognizing our human predicament and learning from it. In meditation we”re allowing the mind to open up and let the things that have been suppressed and repressed become conscious, because when things become conscious they have a way of ceasing rather than just being repressed again. We allow things to take their course to cessation, we allow things to go away rather than just push them away.

　　Usually we just push certain things away from us, refusing to accept or recognize them. Whenever we feel upset or annoyed with anyone, when we”re bored, or when unpleasant feelings arise, we look at the beautiful flowers or the sky, read a book, watch TV, do something. We”re never fully consciously bored, fully angry. We don”t recognize our despair or disappointment, because we can always run off into something else. We can always go to the refrigerator, eat cakes and sweets, listen to the stereo. It”s so easy to absorb into music, away from boredom and despair into something that”s exciting or interesting or calming or beautiful.

　　Look at how dependent we are on watching TV and reading. There are so many books now that they”ll all have to be burnt — useless books everywhere, everybody”s writing things without having anything worth saying. Today”s not-so-pleasant film stars write their biographies and make a lot of money. Then there are the gossip columns: people get away from the boredom of their own existence, their discontent with it, the tediousness, by reading gossip about movie stars and public figures.

　　We”ve never really accepted boredom as a conscious state. As soon as it comes into the mind we start looking for something interesting, some-thing pleasant. But in meditation we”re allowing boredom to be. We”re allowing ourselves to be fully consciously bored, fully depressed, fed up, jealous, angry, disgusted. All the nasty unpleasant experiences of life that we have repressed out of consciousness and never really looked at, never really accepted, we begin to accept into conscious-ness — not as personality problems any more, but just out of compassion. Out of kindness and wisdom we allow things to take their natural course to cessation, rather that just keep them going round in the same old cycles of habit. If we have no way of letting things take their natural course, then we”re always controlling, always caught in some dreary habit of mind. When we”re jaded and depressed we”re unable to appreciate the beauty of things, because we never really see them as they truly are.

　　I remember one experience I had in my first year of meditation in Thailand. I spent most of that year by myself in a little hut, and the first few months were really terrible all kinds of things kept coming up in my mind — obsessions and fears and terror and hatred. I”d never felt so much hatred. I”d never thought of myself as one who hated people, but during those first few months of meditation it seemed like I hated everybody. I couldn”t think of anything nice about anyone, there was so much aversion coming up into consciousness. Then one afternoon I started having this strange vision — I thought I was going crazy, actually — I saw people walking off my…

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