Continuing...
The Purpose of Life
When you start reflecting on death, everything starts to become so clear. You realize how foolish you have been. During my life I have wasted so much time, when I really didn't have time to waste. When I look back on my early years as a monk, I did waste too much time. But fortunately I had enough good meditation as well. Now as a forty-nine year old monk I can't afford to waste any more time.
I look at all the opportunities young monks have, and sometimes, well, they don't make good use of those opportunities. They don't hang around in their huts, or on their walking paths for hour after hour, walking and sitting, walking and sitting. They don't use the time in between walking and sitting to study the suttas, and to contemplate their meaning. If you are wasting time, isn't that a shame!
Here we have one of the best monasteries in the world and some of the best facilities. Of all the monasteries that I have been to, this is one of the best. It's as good as it gets. Sometimes, just living in a forest takes so much effort. In the forest monasteries that I knew in Thailand, you had to spend so much of the day just walking the long distance for the alms round, and then working in the monastery in the afternoon. The time for seclusion to meditate was very limited.
So, reflect on the following: 'I don't know how long I'll have these facilities. I don't know how long I'll be healthy enough to do this'. There are enough monks here with bad backs or bad knees, bad this and bad that. If you're a healthy monk, or even a reasonably healthy one, if you can sit meditation, cross your legs and straighten your back without too much pain, you are extremely fortunate. You won't always be like that. Use this opportunity now!
It's not just your body that is going to die, your good health will die, your energy will die, and your opportunities will die. So reflect on death, as it says in the suttas, as if your turban was on fire. In other words, death gives precedence to the practice, and it makes the Eightfold Path[3] the most important thing in the world. It gives the Path priority over everything else. It would be wonderful if people had that understanding of death to the degree that they embraced it all the time. It would be wonderful if they had that mindfulness, which remembers that death is always stalking you. Death can happen at any time!
Therefore, what's important to me is to develop the Eightfold Path as much as I can, as deeply as I can, so that I can experience the Jh�nas. It's important that I can experience the Paths and Fruits of this practice. It's important that I can be free. Free first of all from the lower realms, and eventually from rebirth altogether. Otherwise death becomes very scary, even for great practitioners. They can fall so easily if they haven't got this security from bondage, this security from all bad rebirths. We use these reflections on death to generate a sense of urgency.
As we travel the Eightfold Path, we should not use force. We don't 'do' the practice, it is something we allow to happen. We renounce all other business in our lives. I've often noticed that if you just allow this path to happen, it happens so beautifully, so powerfully and so effectively. The problem is we don't allow the path to happen. We are too busy doing other things. It's quite clear what we are supposed to be doing.
We know the section of the Eightfold Path about virtuous conduct; Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood. Everyone in this monastery, even if you are in this monastery temporarily, can tick off those three parts of the Eightfold Path. You're fulfilling them, that is of course, as long as you are keeping the rules and the precepts of this monastery.
Now as to Right Effort, (it is unfortunate that we have to translate these terms into English), as soon as you say right effort, people think of striving and struggling, and forcing and controlling, and doing. If we can somehow turn our minds to effort without doing, to a practice of letting go, then we have gained some deeper understanding about what right effort truly means. It's the effort to let go, not the effort to add to or to get rid of, that is one of the hardest things for the Western mind to get around. Often people waste so many years and so much of their time just trying too hard.
It's the Arahants, and the people who have great wisdom, who have no difficulty. Those of you who have studied P�li, come across this again and again. Jh�nas are easy for the wise; they are attained with no difficulty. You should reflect on how these states can be attained without difficulty? It is because those people know the path to entering the Jh�nas. It is the 'no difficulty' path. So don't make it difficult! If you can let go, disentangle yourself from the past and the future, then there is no difficulty. Let the past and the future die for you, so that you've only got the present moment. Let all thinking die. Then there is no difficulty. What does it mean when you die to all your past? All the things you worried about, and all the concerns about the past, it's all gone. And as for the future who knows?
Into the Light
The present moment is the only thing that you ever have. When you die your body and all your concerns, are taken away from you. What were you worried about? Let it all go. Allow your thinking, thinking, thinking, to die. When a person's dead, they are brain dead, there's no brain activity. When a person dies, often in the first moments after death, there is that silence of the mind, before the mind made body can start to name things, and start to conceptualise about what they are experiencing. For the first few seconds or even longer, it's a time of silence, a different type of perception. This is similar to what one can do in one's meditation, let go of that inner chatter, allow it to die, as if you are dying. Many people when they have been close to death have had spiritual experiences. In many traditions, they have experiences of dying to the world and becoming wise afterwards. The experience which Therav�da monks of our tradition have is that when they get into Jh�nas, they die to the body and become wise to the nature of the mind.
That experience of allowing every thing to disappear is so similar to the process of dying, that the reflection on dying can very easily be incorporated into the practice which leads into Jh�nas. Die to the past and future. Die to the thoughts. Die to the body, and eventually die to the breath. It's as if you take your last breath as you are meditating. In other words your body becomes as still as a corpse, you completely let go of the breathing, and go into the nimitta. It is just like that when a person dies. They go out of their body into the light that is the same as the nimitta.
Really we're talking about an amata state (a deathless state). Amata is a word that is used in PÄ�li. The word death, marana, is always about the death of the body. The death of the mind is called ParinibbÄ�na, but the death of the body is always marana. The past participle of that is mata, dead or died. But do you know what really doesn't die? If you've contemplated this through deep meditation, you know it is this stream of consciousness. It's that which carries on after death. In that sense, the stream of consciousness is amata, because that is beyond the physical death. It's that which can be reborn in the rÅ«pa realms (material realms) or the arÅ«pa realms (immaterial realms). However, that's not the end of things. I think that word amata was popular in the time of the Buddha because, like most people even today, when they talked about some sort of salvation, it was very much a materialistic idea. It was the idea of going into a state of amata, of deathlessness, where they could 'be' forever and ever and ever, without having to worry about death. Some sort of heaven realm, some sort of eternity realm. Perhaps the way the Buddha used the word amata was taking it from common usage and giving it a different meaning. But from experience, what doesn't die is the stream of consciousness, the mano viññana or mind consciousness. In JhÄ�nas you can actually know what mind consciousness really is as an experience.
In the Jh�nas it is as if the body has died along with all the conceptions of the world, all feelings, everything that is concerned with the world and the body. So really the Jh�nas are death-like states, in the sense that the body has gone, it has disappeared. The worlds of the past and future have gone, they have disappeared. All your possessions have gone, they have disappeared. All your thoughts have gone, they have disappeared, along with all the struggling and doing. The coming and going, has gone, they have disappeared. Can you understand me? Can you understand what the word 'death' means? It means transcending this body. It is letting go of the body. The problem is of course, that most people when they die go and get born again, and then they have to die all over again. They keep on doing that because they don't fully die to the world, they die a little bit, but they still want to experience some more.
So you have to learn how to develop the meditation of letting go, that effort which abandons all the plans and busyness, all of those little fetters, those little knots, which tie you to this worldly body. It's fascinating to sometimes reflect on just how wisely you've spent your day. What's occupied your mind today? Do a statistical analysis. How much of your mind has been occupied today with the body, or with the world, or with the monastery, or with your own affairs? And how much has been occupied with the affairs of the deathless? That will give you a good idea of why you're not getting Enlightened. We have to be more occupied with the deathless!
I guess all these can be seen as a form of paramita of giving, then by the logic of cause n effect, you could enhance your current life ( able to give is happiness) as well as next life. 