..续本文上一页ou don”t want to hear or see.

　　In the same way, when you”ve had a good meditation, everything”s nice and peaceful, you”ve got so much happiness, then you”re much more open to seeing those insights which you would normally never allow yourself to contemplate. There”s no-one here. Life is suffering. Everything is impermanent. Those are challenging. Take the suffering of life. This goes completely against the grain. "Life is beautiful. Life is a bowl of cherries. Life is out there for you to enjoy. Go out and experience. If you can”t actually go there, then get a video on it". There”s so many ways to enjoy yourself in this world - they”ve even got virtual reality now. Soon, you”ll be able to get virtual jhanas! Just put on this little mask, push a button, and all these beautiful nimittas will come up and lead you into virtual jhanas! So you don”t have to sit on the floor and waste all these nine or ten days, just do it in half an hour at a virtual reality store. I”m sure that someone will try that one of these days. But that”s not the way it works. We”d like to have it the easy way, but sometimes it takes a lot of giving up and letting go. But actually to see suffering is to see something that, by its very nature, we don”t want to see.

　　I was talking about perceptions the other day, actually right throughout the retreat. There was a very fascinating experiment done, I think it was at Harvard, to examine the way the mind perceives things, where they flashed images up on the screen. They got a few volunteer students to sit and see what was going on, with a notepad by their side. First of all they flashed these images up so fast that there wasn”t really time to understand them - they were just a flash on the screen. And they asked these students to write down what they perceived. And all they could see was, like, a flash of light - that”s all. Then they increased the exposure on the screen, from one-hundredth of a second to, say, two-hundredths of a second. They still only saw a flash. And they kept on increasing the time of exposure on the screen incrementally until there was a flash there and they could catch something, they could perceive something, then they could write down what it was. And they kept on increasing it until they could see it more clearly and write down what it was. Some very interesting things happened when they kept on increasing the exposure more and more and more. At a very early exposure length, when they thought they understood what was there, they continued writing the same thing, kept on seeing it in exactly the same way. One example was when the actual photograph was a bicycle on the stairs going up to one of the lecture halls. One of the students perceived it as a ship. It”s quite easy to do this because it was only shown very quickly, and perception just grasps something and they said it was a ship. The interesting thing was that as the exposure time was increased, incrementally, he still said it was a ship. And at times, when every person who was exposed at that particular length would say it”s a bicycle on the stairs, they would still see it as a ship. The old perceptions had imprinted themselves on the mind they actually saw that image according to their old views. And it took them a really long exposure on the screen to change their old ideas and say "it”s not really a ship, it”s a bicycle on the steps going to a lecture hall".

　　What was interesting there was how, through the perceptions that we have, we form these really strong views, which make us see the whole world to conform to those views, even though they”re completely wrong. That”s why it”s so difficult to catch the illusions of self, the illusions of suffering, the illusions of anicca. We need to have that strong exposure, not just for a secon…

《Deep Insight》全文未完，请进入下页继续阅读…