Work Out Your Own Salvation
- by S. N. Goenka
The following article has been condensed from a discourse given by S. N. Goenka on the second day of a three-day Vipassana course for old students.
At the surface, the mind plays so many games thinking, imagining, dreaming, giving suggestions. But deep inside, the mind remains a prisoner of its own habit pattern, and the habit pattern of the deepest level of the mind is to feel sensations and react. If the sensations are pleasant, the mind reacts with craving; if they are unpleasant, it reacts with aversion.
The enlightenment of the Buddha was to go to the root of the problem. Unless we work at the root level, we will be dealing only with the intellect and only this part of the mind will be purified. As long as the roots of a tree are healthy they will provide healthy sap for the entire tree. So start working with the roots. This was the enlightenment of the Buddha.
When he gave Dhamma, the Noble Eightfold Path the path of sīla (morality), samādhi (mastery over the mind) and paññā (experiential wisdom) it was not to establish a cult, a dogma or a belief. Dhamma is a practical path. Those who walk on it can go to the deepest level and eradicate all their miseries.
Those who have really liberated themselves will understand that going to the depth of the mind making a surgical operation of the mind has to be done by oneself, by each inpidual. Someone can guide you with love and compassion; someone can help you in your journey on the path, but nobody can carry you on their shoulders and say: "I will take you to the final goal, just surrender to me; I will do everything."
You are responsible for your own bondage. You are responsible for making your mind impure, no one else. You are responsible for purifying your mind by breaking all the bondages. No one else can do that for you.
Continuity of practice is the secret of success. When it is said that you should be continuously aware, this means that you must be aware with wisdom of the sensations on the body, where you really experience things arising and passing away. The awareness of anicca is what purifies your mind, the awareness of the arising and passing away of these sensations.
Intellectualising this truth will not help. You may understand: "Everything that arises sooner or later passes away. Anyone who takes birth sooner or later dies. This is anicca." You may understand this correctly but you are not experiencing it. Only your own personal experience will help you to purify your mind and liberate you from your miseries. The word for "experience" used in India at the time of Buddha was vedanā, feeling by experiencing, not just intellectualisation. And this is possible only when a sensation is felt on the body.
Anicca must be experienced. If you are not experiencing it, it is merely a theory. And the Buddha was not interested in theories. Even before the Buddha, and at the time of the Buddha, there were teachers who taught that the entire universe is anicca; this was not new. What was new from the Buddha was the experience of anicca; and when you experience it within the framework of your own body, you have started working at the deepest level of your mind.
Two things are very important for those who walk on the path. The first is breaking the barrier that pides the conscious and the unconscious mind. But even if your conscious mind can now feel those sensations that were previously felt only by the deep unconscious part of your mind, that alone will not help you. The Buddha wanted you to take a second step: change the mind”s habit of reacting at the deepest level.
Coming to the stage where you have started feeling sensations is a good first step, yet the habit pattern of reaction remains. When you feel an unp…
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