..续本文上一页t jumping around. If it jumps on unstable things, it”s always going to be tense, for when it lands on something it knows it has to be ready to jump again at any moment. But when you can find something to stay with for longer periods of time, the mind can allow itself to relax, to soften up a bit. When it softens up you come more easily to know the mind in and of itself, what it”s like, where its attachments are, where it”s still clinging. That allows you to go deeper still. And we find that our ultimate fear is fear of death, which is an extremely realistic fear. It is going to happen, and for most of us it”s a huge mystery. This is where the solution in the meditation comes, for meditation can take you to something beyond death, beyond space and time. Death is something that happens within space and time, but there is something that can be experienced outside of those dimensions. That”s what we”re looking for. As the texts say, there are four reasons why people are afraid of death. One, they”re attached to their bodies, they know they are going to lose their bodies at death. Two, they”re attached to sensory pleasures, they know they are going to lose them at death. These two types of fear are based on passion. The third type is based on aversion, when people know that they have done cruel things in the past and that there may be punishment for those cruel things after death. The fourth type is based on delusion, when people are , uncertain about the true dhamma: Was the Buddha right

　　 Is there really a deathless

　　 As long as you don”t know these things directly for yourself, there is always going to be an uncertainty, a large amount of ignorance and delusion surrounding death, creating fear.

　　The whole purpose of the practice is to counteract these causes for fear, so that you aren”t dependent on the body, you don”t have to cling to the body for your happiness, you don”t have to cling to sensory pleasures for your happiness, you train yourself to do good things, and you reach the point where you know you”re on the right path.

　　To do this you have to take apart the basic building blocks of experience, as you experience them in concentration: form, feeling, perceptions, thought constructs, and consciousness. You look to see where these things are inconstant. Where they”re inconstant, you realize they”re stressful. There”s stress right there. Then when you look at stress, look at suffering—although at this level it”s more stress than suffering—you ask yourself, “What am I doing to cause that stress, to aggravate that stress

　　” You look for the cause, and it”s right there in your intentional actions. When you can take those intentions apart, things open up. Once they open up, you realize that you have come to something totally different, a totally different dimension, outside of space and time. And you realize that death can”t touch that. Only with that direct experience can you say that you”ve overcome your fear of death. The only fear you”re left with is the fear you might have lapses of mindfulness where you might do something unskillful. So there is still work to be done. At the very least, though, in the gross sense of the five precepts, you wouldn”t intentionally do anything unskillful.

　　So this is how the meditation deals with fear. It breaks the fear down into other emotions, looking for the underlying causes in terms of the greed, passion, anger, and delusion that give rise to the fear and keep it going. At the same time, the meditation points directly at the way we pin our hopes on happiness, and allows us to pin our hopes, not on something changeable or out of our control, but on a dimension beyond the reach of things that could harm it. So the cure for fear is not just a matter of talking yourself out of it, but of putting yourself in a position of strength, where there really is no danger, nothing to fear.

　　So these are a few thoughts on dealing with the emotion of fear as it comes. —Learn to separate the physical from the mental side, so you don”t misunderstand what”s happening in the body, so it doesn”t stir up more confusion in the mind.

　　—Learn how to focus directly on the mind, to see exactly what the problem is, where the sense of weakness is, where the clinging is, because wherever there”s clinging there”s weakness. And that”s what fear is all about: that sense of weakness in the face of danger.

　　—And then look to see if that danger is realistic. If it”s not, there”s one way of dealing with it; if it”s realistic, there”s another deeper way of dealing with it. This way you find you can not only get a handle on your fear or learn to cope with fear but put yourself in a position ultimately where there is nothing to fear. And that is what makes this practice so special. Freud once said that the purpose of psychotherapy is to take people out of their neurotic suffering and leave them with the ordinary misery of daily life. Buddhism, however, takes you from the ordinary miseries of human life and takes you beyond, to a dimension where there is no misery, no suffering. It deals not only with unrealistic fears or fears that are way out of proportion, but also with the fears that are really well founded, realistic. It can take you beyond even those to a point where, in all reality, there is nothing to fear.

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