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Observations on the Art of Meditation by Translated from the Thai This work may be freely copied, printed, and redistributed
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It's important to realize how to focus on events in order to get
special benefits from your practice. You have to focus so as to
observe and contemplate, not simply to make the mind still. Focus on
how things arise, how they disband. Make your focus subtle and
deep.
When you're aware of the characteristics of your sensations, then
-- if it's a physical sensation -- contemplate that physical
sensation. There will have to be a feeling of stress. Once there's a
feeling of stress, how will you be aware of it simply as a feeling so
that it won't lead to anything further? Once you can be aware of it
simply as a feeling, it stops right there without producing any taste
in terms of a desire for anything. The mind will disengaged right
there -- right there at the feeling. If you don't focus on it in this
way, craving will arise on top of the feeling -- craving to attain
ease and be rid of the stress and pain. If you don't focus on the
feeling in the proper way right from the start, craving will arise
before you're aware of it, and if you then try to let go of it, it'll
be very tiring....
The way in which preoccupations take shape, the sensations of the
mind as it's aware of things coming with every moment, the way these
things change and disband: These are all things you have to focus on
to see clearly. This is why we make the mind disengaged. We don't
disengage it so that it doesn't know or amount to anything. That's not
the kind of disengagement we want. The more the mind is truly
disengaged, the more it sees clearly into the characteristics of the
arising and disbanding within itself. All I ask is that you observe
things carefully, that your awareness be all-around at all times. Work
at this as much as you can. If you can keep this sort of awareness
going, you'll find that the mind or consciousness under the
supervision of mindfulness and discernment in this way is different
from -- is opposite from -- unsupervised consciousness. It will be the
opposite sort of thing continually.
If you keep the mind well supervised so that it's sensitive in
the proper way, it will yield enormous benefits, not just small ones.
If you don't make it properly sensitive and aware, what can you expect
to gain from it?
When we say that we gain from the practice, we're not talking
about anything else: We're talking about gaining disengagement.
Freedom. Emptiness. Before, the mind was embroiled. Defilement and
craving attacked and robbed it, leaving it completely entangled. Now
it's disengaged, freed from the defilements that used to gang up to
burn it. Its desires for this or that thing, its concocting of this or
that thought, have all fallen away. So now it's empty and disengaged.
It can be empty in this way right before your very eyes. Try to see it
right now, before your eyes, right now as I'm speaking and you're
listening. Probe on in so as to know.
If you can be constantly aware in this way, you're following in
the footsteps or taking within you the quality called "buddho,"
which means one who knows, who is awake, who has blossomed in the
Dhamma. Even if you haven't fully blossomed -- if you've blossomed
only to the extent of disengaging from the blatant levels of craving
and defilement -- you still benefit a great deal, for when the mind
really knows the defilements and can let them go, it feels cool and
refreshed in and of itself. This is the exact opposite of the
defilements which, as soon as they arise, make us burn and smoulder
inside. If we don't have the mindfulness and discernment to help us
know, the defilements will burn us. But as soon as mindfulness and
discernment know, the fires go out -- and they go out cold.
Observe how the defilements arise and take shape -- they also
disband in quick succession, but when they disband on their own in
this way, go out on their own in this way, they go out hot. If we have
mindfulness and discernment watching over them, they go out cold. Look
so that you can see what the true knowledge of mindfulness and
discernment is like: It goes out; it goes out cold. As for the
defilements, even when they arise and disband in line with their
nature, they go out hot -- hot because we latch onto them, hot because
of attachment. When they go out cold, look again -- it's because
there's no attachment. They've been let go, put out.
This is something really worth looking into: the fact that
there's something very special like this in the mind -- special in
that when it really knows the truth, it isn't attached. It's
unentangled, empty, and free. This is how it's special. It can grow
empty of greed, anger, and delusion, step after step. It can be empty
of desire, empty of mental processes. The important thing is that you
really see for yourself that the true nature of the mind is that it
can be empty....This is why I said this morning that nibbana
doesn't lie anywhere else. It lies right here, right where things go
out and are cool, go out and are cool. It's staring us right in the
face. K. Khao-suan-luang
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