..续本文上一页ade them wrong. If whole areas of your awareness are blocked off, how can you gain all‐around insight

　　 And as I”ve noticed in years since, people adept at blotting out large areas of awareness through powerful one‐pointedness also tend to be psychologically adept at dissociation and denial. This is why Ajaan Fuang, following Ajaan Lee, taught a form of breath meditation that aimed at an all‐around awareness of the breath energy throughout the body, playing with it to gain a sense of ease, and then calming it so that it wouldn”t interfere with a clear vision of the subtle movements of the mind. This all‐around awareness helped to eliminate the blind spots where ignorance likes to lurk.

　　An ideal state of concentration for giving rise to insight is one that you can analyze in terms of stress and the absence of stress even while you”re in it. Once your mind was firmly established in a state of concentration, Ajaan Fuang would recommend “lifting” it from its object, but not so far that the concentration was destroyed. From that perspective, you could evaluate what levels of stress were still present in the concentration and let them go. In the initial stages, this usually involved evaluating how you were relating to the breath, and detecting more subtle levels of breath energy in the body that would provide a basis for deeper levels of stillness. Once the breath was perfectly still, and the sense of the body started dissolving into a formless mist, this process would involve detecting the perceptions of “space,” “knowing,” “oneness,” etc., that would appear in place of the body and could be peeled away like the layers of an onion in the mind. In either case, the basic pattern was the same: detecting the level of perception or mental fabrication that was causing the unnecessary stress, and dropping it for a more subtle level of perception or fabrication until there was nothing left to drop. This was why, as long as your awareness was still and alert all‐around, it didn”t matter whether you were in the first or the fourteenth jhana, for the way you treated your state of concentration was always the same. By directing your attention to issues of stress and its absence, he was pointing you to terms by which to evaluate your state of mind for yourself, without having to ask any outside authority. And, as it turns out, the terms you can evaluate for yourself — stress, its cause, its cessation, and the path to its cessation—are the issues that define the four noble truths: the right view that the Buddha says can lead to total liberation.

《Jhana Not by the Numbers》全文阅读结束。