..续本文上一页a skilful meditator can just say ”stop”! They can let go in a moment and stop fighting, stop craving, stop trying to control. But when you experience great pain you may think you are going crazy and fight even more. Ask yourself, what”s wrong with being in great pain or being greatly disappointed
The answer is, nothing is wrong. Such things are a natural part of life. They are unavoidable. So, let go of the ”controller”.
When you let go of the controller and stop craving, a strange thing happens. The madness stops and the pain disappears. I had that happen to me with great pain once. Every monastic has to come across this sooner or later. Some just want to run away, but they know they can”t. It”s a case of wanting to go forward, but you can”t go forward, wanting to go backwards, but you can”t go backwards, wanting to stay still, but you can”t stay still. You don”t know what to do! You can”t go forward, you can”t go back, you can”t stay still - this is where you let go. When you do let go, you find out that half of the suffering was the fighting.
The Lord Buddha said there are two thorns which cause suffering in a human being (see SN,36,6). The first thorn is the thorn of the five senses which is physical suffering. The second thorn is the mental thorn. There”s the thorn of having sickness, having pain, and having to hear, see, taste, smell, and touch unpleasant things. Then there is the proliferation which goes around that, which is mental pain. It”s very important here to notice the physical pain - seeing what you don”t want to see, hearing what you don”t want to hear, and doing what you don”t want to do. And it”s important to recognise there”s not much you can do about that. For example, when I was a young monk I thought if I ever became an abbot, it would be fine because I could always do what I wanted to do. I could give all the orders, and I”d only give the orders I wanted to. Ironically, I found out that the more authority I had, the more of a prison I was in! I couldn”t just do what I wanted. I had responsibility. I was even more controlled by the situation than before. So in the end I realised I had to give up trying to control, trying to somehow make things different.
Let go, just be with the present moment. You will find out that if you can let go of the pain and allow it to be, the whole situation changes. The first time I did this as a monk in Thailand was with a toothache. As soon as I let go the pain disappeared. It was quite a remarkable event in my monastic life to see intense pain suddenly go - just through wisdom power. Ajahn Chah and other great monks, following the Lord Buddha, always taught the Third Noble Truth as a way to end suffering, that is to let go of craving. They kept on saying it again and again, but theory is never as powerful as practise.
If you really let go, the whole problem just caves in - it fades and disappears. This is a beautiful moment of insight. Not insight based on thinking or theory, but insight based on experience. For a moment you let go of suffering because you don”t fight. Thus the Second and Third Noble Truths are not just something to be thought about, written about, and theorised about, they are to be practised, especially the Third Noble Truth about letting go.
That is why in this monastery I have been teaching meditation aimed at letting go of the ”controller”, particularly in deeper meditation when we can carelessly get too involved in trying to make the breath quiet or make some mental images (nimitta) appear and move it this way or that. What are we doing that for
- or rather, what”s doing it
As we look deeper and deeper into the problem, we might have enough wisdom and enough courage to let go. Every meditator who has ever come to me and said that they got into a …
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