..续本文上一页lse I would do head stands or shoulder stands. Even though in the early days I didn”t have a tremendous amount of energy, I still managed to do something requiring effort. I would learn to sustain it for a few seconds and then I would lose it again, but that was better than doing nothing at all.
The more we take the easy way, the path of least resistance — the more we just follow our desires, the more the mind becomes sloppy, heedless and confused. It is easy to think, easier to sit and think all the time than not to think — it is a habit we”ve acquired. Even the thought, “I shouldn”t think,” is just another thought. To avoid thought we have to be mindful of it, to put forth effort by watching and listening, by being attentive to the flow in our minds. Rather than thinking about our mind, we watch it. Rather than just getting caught in thoughts, we keep recognizing them. Thought is movement, it is energy, it comes and goes, it is not a permanent condition of the mind. Without evaluating or analysing, when we simply recognize thought as thought, it begins to slow down and stop. This isn”t annihilation, this is allowing things to cease. It is compassion. As the habitual obsessive thinking begins to fade, great spaces we never knew were there begin to appear.
We are slowing everything down by absorbing into the natural breath, calming the kammic formations, and this is what we mean by samatha or tranquillity: coming to a point of calm. The mind becomes malleable, supple and flexible, and the breathing can become very fine. But we only carry the samatha practice to the point of upacara samadhi [approaching concentration], we don”t try to completely absorb into the object and enter jhana. At this point we are still aware of both the object and its periphery. The extreme kinds of mental agitation have diminished considerably, but we can still operate using wisdom.
With our wisdom faculty still functioning, we investigate, and this is vipassana — looking into and seeing the nature of whatever we experience: its impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and imperson-ality. Anicca, dukkha and anatta are not concepts we believe in, but things we can observe. We investigate the beginning of an inhalation and its ending. We observe what a beginning is, not thinking about what it is, but observing, aware with bare attention at the beginning of an inhalation and its end. The body breathes all on its own: the in-breath conditions the out-breath and the out-breath conditions the in-breath, we can”t control anything. Breathing belongs to nature, it doesn”t belong to us — it is not-self. When we see this we are doing vipassana.
The sort of knowledge we gain from Buddhist meditation is humbling — Ajahn Chah calls it the earth-worm knowledge — it doesn”t make you arrogant, it doesn”t puff you up, it doesn”t make you feel that you are anything, or that you have attained anything. In worldly terms, this practice doesn”t seem very important or necessary. Nobody is ever going to write a newspaper headline: “At eight o”clock this evening Venerable Sumedho had an inhalation!, To some people, thinking about how to solve all the world”s problems might seem very important, how to help all the people in the Third World, how to set the world right. Compared with these things, watching our breath seems insignificant, and most people think, “Why waste time doing that
” People have confronted me about this, saying: “What are you monks doing sitting there
What are you doing to help humanity
You”re just selfish, you expect people to give you food while you just sit there and watch your breath. You”re running away from the real world.”
But what is the real world
Who is really running away, and from what
What is there to face
We find that what people call the “real w…
《Now Is The Knowing》全文未完，请进入下页继续阅读…