..续本文上一页”t have to get stuck on things. There is actually a place in the mind where you”re making a choice to latch on. Only when things get really still in the mind and your awareness is really clear can you see that choice as an act—that you made the choice to lower your resistance and latch onto the germs when you didn”t have to. That”s where you can let go. One, you see the drawbacks of the diseases caused by the germs and, two, you realize that you don”t really have to come down with those diseases. They”re not really necessary. When you can identify the particular disease patterns, they will never be necessary. They seem necessary only when you can”t conceive of anything else. “Things have to be that way,” or so the mind tells itself. If the mind had to be that way, there would be no purpose in meditating, there would be no purpose in the Buddha”s teaching. He could have sat around under the Bodhi tree for the rest of his life and just enjoyed the bliss of Awakening. He realized, though, that teaching would serve a purpose. So that”s what we”re doing—we”re carrying out that purpose, putting his teachings into practice so we can gain the results that he wanted to see from the effort he put into his teaching. All this comes under right effort, realizing when you have skillful states, realizing when you have unskillful states, and being determined that once an unskillful state has arisen you”re not going to feed it, you”re not going to follow along with it. Some people have problems with this, especially with the issue of struggling or effort or having a goal. The problem, though, doesn”t lie with effort or goals in and of themselves. It lies with your attitude toward them. You need to have a healthy attitude toward this struggle. You need to have a healthy attitude toward the effort, toward the goal, because the goal is what gives you a direction in life. Without goals, life would just be floundering around, like fish flopping around in a puddle.

　　So you need to have a direction. You realize that maybe this is a bigger task than other tasks you have taken on, so you don”t berate yourself for not getting to the goal immediately or not catching on right away. You learn through experience what your pace is and you stick to it. Sometimes you push yourself a little too hard in order to know what it means to push yourself too hard, and then you let off. And you find that you tend to vacillate back and forth between pushing too hard and not pushing enough, but as long as you”re sensitive to this fact you begin to get a better and better sense of what “just right” is.

　　When the Buddha talks about the Middle Way, it”s not necessarily what our preconceived notions of the Middle Way are. You have to test them. And the effort required is not blind effort. Right effort involves using your eyes: knowing what”s skillful in the mind, what”s unskillful, being determined to let go of anything unskillful that arises in the mind, and trying to prevent more unskillful things from arising in the mind. At the same time, you try to realize when skillful qualities have appeared. You try to maintain them, develop them, make them strong. So there”s both the letting-go and the developing, and the function of discernment is to tell when which is appropriate. You have to listen very carefully to what”s happening in the mind, watch things in the mind, be observant. This is why a lot of the meditation instructions throw things back on you, on your own powers of observation, because only by developing those powers can you develop the discernment you”re going to need. Sometimes in the Buddha”s teachings, it”s almost as if he purposely leaves a few blanks, doesn”t explain everything, leaves things for you to figure out on your own, because if everything were handed to …

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