..续本文上一页thing has happened to you, you”ve cried more tears in all of your existences than the water in all the oceans of the world (SN,15,3). That”s a lot of tears you”ve shed and a lot of crying you”ve done. When are you going to stop filling up the oceans

　　 When are your bones going to stop filling up the graveyards

　　 When you see the Four Noble Truths, that”s when.

　　The Lord Buddha said that once you”ve seen the Four Noble Truths and seen the inherent suffering of life, you get revulsion coming up - this beautiful, wonderful revulsion, which does not seek for escape outside, but seeks for escape inside instead. You”re not like that dog with the mange trying to go somewhere else to get rid of the mange, and you”re not like a dog trying to kill itself to get rid of the mange. Instead you”re trying to be content with the mange, learning to live with rather than against. You find that when you can be content with the mange, the mange disappears. Through craving you”ve known suffering. From fully seeing suffering you get revulsion. From revulsion comes dispassion (viraga). Dispassion is the fading away of everything, things disappearing, going, ending. It is wonderful when you start to see things disappear, the whole world fading away and vanishing into emptiness. It”s marvelous to know things vanishing.

　　I remember as a young man travelling in the south of Mexico to a town called Oaxaca. It was the centre of the mushroom culture, but I wasn”t interested in mushrooms and I wasn”t taking them either, because I was already a Buddhist by that time. I remember getting a mental image (nimitta) while in a room and seeing the walls and the ceiling become like butter and just melt and disappear into nothingness. That was quite scary at the time. But it was just a sign that I was beginning to understand what perception is all about and allowing things to disappear, fade, and go empty.

　　All of this which you take to be real is an illusion. As the Lord Buddha said, this body of yours is just like froth on the river Ganges (SN,22,95). You poke it and there”s nothing really there. It”s not yours, it”s just a body. Just blood and bones made up of food. You look at feeling, and it”s just like a raindrop hitting a puddle. During my retreat - during one of the rainstorms - when I came to the end of my walking path under my verandah, there was heavy rain. There was a puddle there and there was froth on one side and little bubbles coming from the drips in the gutter. I thought to myself that this froth is just like my body, and the little bubbles caused by the drops of water hitting the puddle is all feeling is. Happy feeling, unhappy feeling, in between, pop! - and it”s gone; another one, and another one, and another one, completely uncertain and beyond my control. You know that sometimes you will feel happy and that sometimes unhappy, and there”s nothing you can do about it in this life. It”s just nature.

　　The More You Give Up, The More Happiness You Have

　　"Joy at last to know there”s no happiness in the world." That means there is nothing wrong with you. When you actually understand this, you can let go of this building up of more worlds. When you understand it, then, in meditation, you make the world more and more simple. And how much more simple can you make it than by getting into a deep meditation where there”s hardly anything left

　　 Sometimes you can get to the point where there”s only the breath left, and that”s the only thing left in the whole world. That”s pretty neat! Sometimes you can let go of the breath, and you”ve only got a mental image left, just a beautiful ”light” in the mind. It”s not going away and it”s completely stable. That”s beautiful! That”s probably the best bliss you”ve ever experienced. But go deeper and you get into Jhana which is …

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