..续本文上一页is point you start to get worried, which is another way you can fool yourself. So I”d like to insert a few remarks here so that you”ll understand.

　　When it happens that the breath disappears from your sense of awareness, you might begin to worry: "If the breath disappears, won”t I die

　　" If you think this you”re fooling yourself, because when this happens you”re sure to become afraid that you”ll die, with the result that the breath immediately reappears. That”s as far as you”ll get and things won”t get any more refined than that. So to get past any obstacle created when the breath disappears during your meditation you should tell yourself that: "Even though the breath may disappear, the mind is still here with the body, so I won”t die." This is enough to get rid of the problem of your fear of death at that point, which is simply a momentary distraction.

　　Actually, when you fall asleep, which is similar to dying, you don”t pay any attention to whether or not the breath disappears -- and you don”t die. When you meditate, your awareness is much more alert and refined than that; you know that the breath has disappeared because of the alertness of your meditation, so you should be even more discriminating than when you fall asleep -- instead, you get afraid! This shows that you”re not up on the tricks of the defilements.

　　So to be up on their tricks, you should remind yourself of the truth: "The breath has disappeared, but the mind is still with the body, so I won”t die." Just this is enough to make the mind break through to a more refined level where the whole body disappears together with the breath. The defilements won”t impinge on your awareness at all. This is called reaching the point of refinement in breathing meditation. Some people can stay at this level for hours, others don”t stay very long. It all depends on the strength of the inpidual meditator.

　　What you”ll gain as a result in that moment is the refinement of the mind that is simply aware, all by itself -- simply aware of itself at that moment, not involved with any preoccupations at all. This is called ”one-pointedness of mind.” If the mind isn”t involved with any object at all, so that only knowingness remains, that”s called one-pointedness. It is at one with the knowingness, not paired with any object or meditation-word at all, because at that point it has completely let go of its meditation-word. All that remains is the knowingness staying there by itself. This is called one-pointedness of mind.

　　This is the way meditation develops as it becomes progressively clearer and clearer to the heart of the person doing it. If you actually follow the principles of the Lord Buddha”s Dhamma, there”s nowhere else you can go. You”ll have to come to the truth. In other words, the results you receive will have to follow in line with the causes you”ve practised correctly. However much pleasure you receive when the mind settles down, it will immediately hit you: "This is what pleasure is" -- because the pleasure you feel in the heart at that point is unlike any other pleasure you”ve ever experienced. It”s a pleasure more uncanny and amazing than any other pleasure in the world.

　　This is why the religion has lasted up to the present. If it weren”t for this, it would have vanished long ago, because its flavour would have been no match for the flavours of the world. It wouldn”t have had any solid worth, any marvels to compete with the world at all. It would have folded up long ago because no one would have been interested enough to keep it going up to the present. But the fact that it has lasted is because it”s more worthwhile than any of the worlds on the three levels of the cosmos. Even just the stage of the quiet mind lets us see something of the marvels that lie within us, in our bod…

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