..续本文上一页 Rather than focusing your attention on one thing, you are opening the mind completely; you are not choosing an object -- a conditioned object -- but the space where the conditioned objects are.

　　It”s the same with the mind, you can apply that inwardly. When your eyes are closed, you are not looking at something, but it is like listening to the inner voices that go on -- those things that say, ”I am this, I should not be like that”... you use those for taking you to the space, rather than making a big problem about the obsessions and fears that go on in your mind. In this way, even the devil, or an evil thought, can take you to emptiness.

　　This is very skilful, because it is no longer a battle where we are trying to get rid of evil and kill off the devil. It is letting the devil have his due. The devil is an impermanent thing it rises and ceases in the mind -- so you don”t have to making anything out of it. Devil or angels -- they are all the same really. Before, you”d think, ”devil!”. Now trying to get rid of the devil, or trying to grasp hold of the angels is dukkha. But if we take up this cool position of Buddha-knowing -- knowing the ways things are -- then everything becomes the truth of the way it is. So we see that the good, the bad, the skilful, unskilful, or neither skilful or unskilful dhammas are all qualities that arise and cease.

　　This is what we mean by reflections, beginning to notice the way it is. Rather than assuming that it should be any way at all, you are simply noticing. So what I am saying now is to encourage you to notice -- rather than telling you -- how it is. Don”t go around saying, ”Venerable Sumedho told us the way it is.” I am not trying to convince you of this, but just trying to present a way for you to consider, a way of reflecting on your own experiences, on your own mind. Sometimes if these things are pointed out we begin to notice them, like the sound of silence -- you never notice it until somebody points it out. It is there all the time, but something that you”ve never really noticed. Because it doesn”t have any particular quality to it, it doesn”t stick in the mind as a memory until it is pointed out, and then you think, ”Oh yes!”

　　(Newsletter, January-March 1994, Buddhist Society of Western Australia)

《Noticing Space》全文阅读结束。