..续本文上一页 like post‐it notes: convenient markers for my own reference that I might have to peel off and stick elsewhere as I became more familiar with the territory of my mind. This proved to be a valuable lesson that applied to all areas of my practice.
Still, Ajaan Fuang didn”t leave me to reinvent the Dharma wheel totally on my own. Experience had shown him that some approaches to concentration worked better than others for putting the mind in a position where it could exercise its ingenuity and accurately judge the results of its experiments, and he was very explicit in recommending those approaches. Among the points he emphasized were these:
Strong concentration is absolutely necessary for liberating insight. “Without a firm basis in concentration,“ he often said, ”insight is just concepts.” To see clearly the connections between stress and its causes, the mind has to be very steady and still. And to stay still, it requires the strong sense of well being that only strong concentration can provide.
To gain insight into a state of concentration, you have to stick with it for a long time. If you push impatiently from one level of concentration to the next, or if you try to analyze a new state of concentration too quickly after you”ve attained it, you never give it the chance to show its full potential and you don”t give yourself the chance to familiarize yourself with it. So you have to keep working at it as a skill, something you can tap into in all situations. This enables you to see it from a variety of perspectives and to test it over time, to see if it really is as totally blissful, empty, and effortless as it may have seemed on first sight.
The best state of concentration for the sake of developing all‐around insight is one that encompasses a whole‐body awareness. There were two exceptions to Ajaan Fuang”s usual practice of not identifying the state you had attained in your practice, and both involved states of wrong concentration. The first was the state that comes when the breath gets so comfortable that your focus drifts from the breath to the sense of comfort itself, your mindfulness begins to blur, and your sense of the body and your surroundings gets lost in a pleasant haze. When you emerge, you find it hard to identify where exactly you were focused. Ajaan Fuang called this moha‐samadhi, or delusion‐concentration.
The second state was one I happened to hit one night when my concentration was extremely one‐pointed, and so refined that it refused settle on or label even the most fleeting mental objects. I dropped into a state in which I lost all sense of the body, of any internal/external sounds, or of any thoughts or perceptions at all—although there was just enough tiny awareness to let me know, when I emerged, that I hadn”t been asleep. I found that I could stay there for many hours, and yet time would pass very quickly. Two hours would seem like two minutes. I could also “program” myself to come out at a particular time. After hitting this state several nights in a row, I told Ajaan Fuang about it, and his first question was, “Do you like it
” My answer was “No,” because I felt a little groggy the first time I came out. “Good,” he said. “As long as you don”t like it, you”re safe. Some people really like it and think it”s nibbana or cessation. Actually, it”s the state of non‐perception (asaññi‐bhava). It”s not even right concentration, because there”s no way you can investigate anything in there to gain any sort of discernment. But it does have other uses.” He then told me of the time he had undergone kidney surgery and, not trusting the anesthesiologist, had put himself in that state for the duration of the operation.
In both these states of wrong concentration, the limited range of awareness was what m…
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