..续本文上一页 brain. I saw my mother just walk out of my brain and into emptiness, disappear into space. Then my father and my sister followed. I actually saw these visions walking out of my head. I thought, “I”m crazy! I”ve gone off!” — but it wasn”t an unpleasant experience.
The next morning when I woke from sleep and looked around, I felt that everything I saw was beautiful. Everything, even the most unbeautiful detail, was beautiful. I was in a state of awe. The hut itself was a crude structure, not beautiful by anyone”s standards, but it looked to me like a palace. The scrubby looking trees outside looked like a most beautiful forest. Sunbeams were streaming through the window onto a plastic dish, and the plastic dish looked beautiful! That sense of beauty stayed with me for about a week, and then reflecting on it I suddenly realized that that”s the way things really are when the mind is clear. Up to that time I”d been looking through a dirty window, and over the years I”d become so used to the scum and dirt on the window that I didn”t realize it was dirty, I”d thought that that”s the way it was.
When we get used to looking through a dirty window everything seems grey, grimy and ugly. Meditation is a way of cleaning the window, purifying the mind, allowing things to come up into consciousness and letting them go. Then with the wisdom faculty, the Buddha-wisdom, we observe how things really are. It”s not just attaching to beauty, to purity of mind, but actually understand-ing. It is wisely reflecting on the way nature operates, so that we are no longer deluded by it into creating habits for our life through ignorance.
Birth means old age, sickness and death, but that”s to do with your body, it”s not you. Your human body is not really yours. No matter what your particular appearance might be, whether you are healthy or sickly, whether you are beautiful or not beautiful, whether you are black or white or whatever, it”s all non-self. This is what we mean by anatta, that human bodies belong to nature, that they follow the laws of nature: they are born, they grow up, they get old and they die.
Now we may understand that rationally, but emotionally there is a very strong attachment to the body. In meditation we begin to see this attach-ment. We don”t take the position that we shouldn”t be attached, saying: “The problem with me is that I”m attached to my body. I shouldn”t be. It”s bad, isn”t it
If I was a wise person I wouldn”t be attached to it.” That”s starting from an ideal again. It”s like trying to start climbing a tree from the top saying, “I should be at the top of the tree. I shouldn”t be down here.” But as much as we”d like to think that we”re at the top, we have to humbly accept that we aren”t. To begin with, we have to be at the trunk of the tree, where the roots are, looking at the most coarse and ordinary things before we can start identifying with anything at the top of the tree.
This is the way of wise reflection. It”s not just purifying the mind and then attaching to purity. It”s not just trying to refine consciousness so that we can induce high states of concentration whenever we feel like it, because even the most refined states of sensory consciousness are unsatisfactory, they”re dependent on so many other things. Nibbana is not dependent on any other condition. Conditions of any quality, be they ugly, nasty, beautiful, refined or whatever, arise and pass away — but they don”t interfere with Nibbana, with the peace of the mind.
We are not inclining away from the sensory world through aversion, because if we try to anni-hilate the senses then that too becomes a habit that we blindly acquire, trying to get rid of that which we don”t like. That”s why we have to be very patient.
This lifetime as a human being is a li…
《Now Is The Knowing》全文未完，请进入下页继续阅读…