..续本文上一页tinually and disregard everything else." " I shall be aware of the whole breath continually and disregard anything else" If you instruct the mind very carefully and clearly, you”re giving mindfulness a chance. You only have to tell yourself the message three times at the beginning and just see what happens.

　　If you”ve got a very forgetful type of mindfulness, in other words if you give yourself these instructions and after one or two minutes you find you”re just drifting off to "Goodness knows where", there are two possible reasons. One, you didn”t instruct yourself carefully or clearly enough as to what you”re supposed to be doing; or two, you really have got very weak mindfulness. If you really have weak mindfulness then every three or four minutes you should repeat the instructions. There”s no need to repeat the instructions every ten or fifteen seconds. Repeating of the instructions as often as that causes a disturbance in meditation, which never gives meditation a chance to work and which eventually just gives rise to restlessness and despair.

　　You should give yourself the instructions very carefully, and you”ll find you will remember them. So little by little you develop mindfulness. You will notice that this thing we call mindfulness starts off with a huge territory to be aware of: the present moment. There”s a huge amount of things you can be conscious of in the present moment. Then it”s developed and refined down bit by bit. Instead of anything in the present moment, it becomes that which is silent in the present moment, discarding all that belongs to chatter and thought. Then instead of just silence in the present moment, everything is discarded other than the silent awareness of the breath in the present moment, just awareness of the "in-breath," and the "out-breath". Then everything is discarded other than the full awareness of the breath, from the very beginning of the in-breath to the end of the in-breath, from the very beginning of the out-breath to the end of the out-breath.

　　Samadhi -- Sustained Awareness on Just One Thing

　　The difference between Stage Three and Stage Four, awareness of the breath and full awareness of the breath, is that for awareness of the breath you just have to notice part of each in-breath and part of each out-breath . Once you”ve noticed part of the in-breath then the mind can go wandering off somewhere else, but it has to be "home" again in time to catch the next out-breath. Once it”s seen the breath going out, then it can go off again and observe other things, until it has to come home again to catch the breath going in again. Awareness still has places where it can go. It”s still got some "width". It is tied to the breath, but on a long leash. You can, at this third stage, be aware of other things as well as the breath. But for full awareness of the breath you need to completely lock the awareness into the breathing and be aware of nothing else. That”s why that fourth stage is so important in this meditation. It”s where you really grab hold of your meditation object. You have continuous awareness with it. The awareness here is refined onto one small area of existence, just your breath. This is what we”re doing with awareness. We”re restricting it. Instead of allowing it to go all over the place, we”re focusing it in. And it”s with the focusing in of awareness, that awareness starts to become strong. It”s like using a magnifying glass to start a fire. It”s concentrating all the energies onto one thing. This ability to sustain the mindfulness, to sustain the awareness, to sustain the attention, is called Samadhi. A good definition of Samadhi is: "Sustaining your attention on one thing". No need to call it "concentration", because concentration misses so much of what is really important in …

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