..续本文上一页too great a hurry to move on. Here the questions are, "Which parts of the process were necessary to focus in

　　 Which can now be let go

　　 Which do you have to hold onto in order to maintain this focus

　　" Tuning into the right level of awareness is one process; staying there is another. When you learn how to maintain your sense of stillness, try to keep it going in all situations. What do you discover gets in the way

　　 Is it your own resistance to disturbances

　　 Can you make your stillness so porous that disturbances can go through without running into anything, without knocking your center off balance

　　As you get more and more absorbed in exploring these issues, concentration becomes less a battle against disturbance and more an opportunity for inner exploration. And without even thinking about them, you”re developing the four bases of success: the desire to understand things, the persistence that keeps after your exploration, the close attention you”re paying to cause and effect, and the ingenuity you”re putting into framing the questions you ask. All these qualities contribute to concentration, help it get settled, get solid, get clear.

　　At the same time, they foster discernment. The Buddha once said that the test for a person”s discernment is how he or she frames a question and tries to answer it. Thus to foster discernment, you can”t simply stick to pre-set directions in your meditation. You have to give yourself practice in framing questions and testing the karma of those questions by looking for their results.

　　Ultimately, when you reach a perception of the breath that allows the sensations of in-and-out breathing to grow still, you can start questioning more subtle perceptions of the body. It”s like tuning into a radio station. If your receiver isn”t precisely tuned to the frequency of the signal, the static interferes with the subtleties of whatever is being transmitted. But when you”re precisely tuned, every nuance comes through. The same with your sensation of the body: when the movements of the breath grow still, the more subtle nuances of how perception interacts with physical sensation come to the fore. The body seems like a mist of atomic sensations, and you can begin to see how your perceptions interact with that mist. To what extent is the shape of the body inherent in the mist

　　 To what extent is it intentional -- something added

　　 What happens when you drop the intention to create that shape

　　 Can you focus on the space between the droplets in the mist

　　 What happens then

　　 Can you stay there

　　 What happens when you drop the perception of space and focus on the knowing

　　 Can you stay there

　　 What happens when you drop the oneness of the knowing

　　 Can you stay there

　　 What happens when you try to stop labeling anything at all

　　As you settle into these more formless states, it”s important that you not lose sight of your purpose in tuning into them. You”re here to understand suffering, not to over-interpret what you experience. Say, for instance, that you settle into an enveloping sense of space or consciousness. From there, it”s easy to assume that you”ve reached the primordial awareness, the ground of being, from which all things emerge, to which they all return, and which is essentially untouched by the whole process of emerging and returning. You might take descriptions of the Unconditioned and apply them to what you”re experiencing. If you”re abiding in a state of neither perception nor non-perception, it”s easy to see it as a non-abiding, devoid of distinctions between perceiver and perceived, for mental activity is so attenuated as to be virtually imperceptible. Struck with the apparent effortlessness of the state, you may feel that you”ve gone beyond passion, aversion, and delusion simply by regarding them as unreal. If you latch onto an assumption like this, you can easily think that you”ve reached the end of the path before your work is really done.

　　Your only protection here is to regard these assumptions as forms of perception, and to dismantle them as well. And here is where the four noble truths prove their worth, as tools for dismantling any assumption by detecting the stress that accompanies it. Ask if there”s still some subtle stress in the concentration that has become your dwelling place. What goes along with that stress

　　 What vagrant movements in the mind are creating it

　　 What persistent movements in the mind are creating it

　　 You have to watch for both.

　　In this way you come face to face with the perceptions that keep even the most subtle states of concentration going. And you see that even they are stressful. If you replace them with other perceptions, though, you”ll simply exchange one type of stress for another. It”s as if your ascending levels of concentration have brought you to the top of a flag pole. You look down and see aging, illness, and death coming up the pole, in pursuit. You”ve exhausted all the options that perception can offer, so what are you going to do

　　 You can”t just stay where you are. Your only option is to release your grip. And if you”re letting go fully, you let go of gravity, too.

《De-perception》全文阅读结束。