..续本文上一页e see this happening can we be said to know past, future, and present.
When this awareness is clear and full, the mind becomes dispassionate and loosens its attachments, coming to a full stop: the stopping of unawareness, the stopping of birth. This is why the Buddha felt no attachment for home or family, for wealth, servants, or material pleasures of any kind.
Coming Home
September 22, 1956
When you close your eyes while sitting in meditation, simply close your eyelids. Don”t try to close off your eyes like a person sleeping. You have to keep your optic nerves awake and working. Otherwise you”ll put yourself to sleep.
Think of your internal meditation object — the in-and-out breath — and then think of bringing your external meditation object — ”buddho,”, awake, which is one of the virtues of the Lord Buddha — in with the breath.
Once you can focus comfortably on the breath, let the breath spread throughout the body until you feel light, supple, and at ease. This is called maintaining the proper quality in practicing concentration. To keep the mind fixed so that it doesn”t slip away from the breath is called maintaining the proper object. Being firmly mindful of your meditation word, without any lapses, is called maintaining the proper intention. When you can keep your mind fixed in these three component factors, you can say that you”re practicing meditation.
Once we set our mind on doing good in this way, things that aren”t good — nivarana, or Hindrances — are bound to come stealing into the mind. If we call the Hindrances by name, there are five of them. But here we aren”t going to talk about their names; we”ll just talk about what they are: (1) Hindrances are things that defile and adulterate the mind. (2) They make the mind dark and murky. (3) They”re obstacles that prevent the mind from staying firmly with the component factors of its meditation.
Hindrances come from external preoccupations, and external preoccupations arise because our internal preoccupation is weak. To say that our internal preoccupation is weak means that our mind doesn”t stay firmly with its object. Like floating a dipper in a barrel of water: If it doesn”t have anything to weigh it down, it”s bound to wobble and tip. The wobbling of the mind is what creates an opening for the various Hindrances to come pouring in and make the mind lose its balance.
We should make ourself aware that when the mind starts tipping, it can tip in either of two directions: (1) It may go toward thoughts of the past, matters that happened two hours ago or all the way back to our very first breath. Distractions of this sort can carry two kinds of meaning for us: Either they deal in terms of worldly matters — our own affairs or those of other people, good or bad — or else they deal in terms of the Dhamma, things good or bad that have happened and that we”ve taken note of. (2) Or else our mind may tip toward thoughts of the future, which are the same sort of thing — our own affairs or those of others, dealing in terms of the world or the Dhamma, good or bad.
When our mind starts drifting in this way, we”re bound to receive one of two sorts of results: contentment or discontentment, moods that indulge either in pleasure or in self affliction. For this reason, we have to catch hold of the mind constantly and bring it into the present so that these Hindrances can”t come seeping in. But even then the mind isn”t really at equilibrium. It”s still apt to waver to some extent. But this wavering isn”t really wrong (if we know how to use it, it isn”t wrong; if we don”t, it is) because the mind, when it wavers, is looking for a place to stay. In Pali, this is called sambhavesin. So we”re taught to find a meditation theme to act as a focal point for the mind, in the same way that a …
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