Bhante Gunaranta:
You can expect certain benefits from your meditation. The initial ones are practical, prosaic things; the later stages are profoundly transcendent. They run together from the simple to the sublime. We will set forth some of them here. Your own experience is all that counts.
Those things that we called hindrances or defilements are more than just unpleasant mental habits. They are the primary manifestations of the ego process itself. The ego sense itself is essentially a feeling of separation -- a perception of distance between that which we call me, and that which we call other. This perception is held in place only if it is constantly exercised, and the hindrances constitute that exercise.
Greed and lust are attempts to get 'some of that' for me; hatred and aversion are attempts to place greater distance between 'me and that'. All the defilements depend upon the perception of a barrier between self and other, and all of them foster this perception every time they are exercised. Mindfulness perceives things deeply and with great clarity. It brings our attention to the root of the defilements and lays bare their mechanism. It sees their fruits and their effects upon us. It cannot be fooled. Once you have clearly seen what greed really is and what it really does to you and to others, you just naturally cease to engage in it. When a child burns his hand on a hot oven, you don't have to tell him to pull it back; he does it naturally, without conscious thought and without decision. There is a reflex action built into the nervous system for just that purpose, and it works faster than thought. By the time the child perceives the sensation of heat and begins to cry, the hand has already been jerked back from the source of pain. Mindfulness works in very much the same way: it is wordless, spontaneous and utterly efficient. Clear mindfulness inhibits the growth of hindrances; continuous mindfulness extinguishes them. Thus, as genuine mindfulness is built up, the walls of the ego itself are broken down, craving diminishes, defensiveness and rigidity lessen, you become more open, accepting and flexible. You learn to share your loving-kindness.
Traditionally, Buddhists are reluctant to talk about the ultimate nature of human beings. But those who are willing to make descriptive statements at all usually say that our ultimate essence or Buddha nature is pure, holy and inherently good. The only reason that human beings appear otherwise is that their experience of that ultimate essence has been hindered; it has been blocked like water behind a dam. The hindrances are the bricks of which the dam is built. As mindfulness dissolves the bricks, holes are punched in the dam and compassion and sympathetic joy come flooding forward. As meditative mindfulness develops, your whole experience of life changes. Your experience of being alive, the very sensation of being conscious, becomes lucid and precise, no longer just an unnoticed background for your preoccupations. It becomes a thing consistently perceived.
Each passing moment stands out as itself; the moments no longer blend together in an unnoticed blur. Nothing is glossed over or taken for granted, no experiences labeled as merely 'ordinary'. Everything looks bright and special. You refrain from categorizing your experiences into mental pigeonholes. Descriptions and interpretations are chucked aside and each moment of time is allowed to speak for itself. You actually listen to what it has to say, and you listen as if it were being heard for the very first time. When your meditation becomes really powerful, it also becomes constant. You consistently observe with bare attention both the breath and every mental phenomenon. You feel increasingly stable, increasingly moored in the stark and simple experience of moment-to-moment existence.
Once your mind is free from thought, it becomes clearly wakeful and at rest in an utterly simple awareness. This awareness cannot be described adequately. Words are not enough. It can only be experienced. Breath ceases to be just breath; it is no longer limited to the static and familiar concept you once held. You no longer see it as a succession of just inhalations and exhalations; it is no longer some insignificant monotonous experience. Breath becomes a living, changing process, something alive and fascinating. It is no longer something that takes place in time; it is perceived as the present moment itself. Time is seen as a concept, not an experienced reality.
This is simplified, rudimentary awareness which is stripped of all extraneous detail. It is grounded in a living flow of the present, and it is marked by a pronounced sense of reality. You know absolutely that this is real, more real than anything you have ever experienced. Once you have gained this perception with absolute certainty, you have a fresh vantage point, a new criterion against which to gauge all of your experience. After this perception, you see clearly those moments when you are participating in bare phenomena alone, and those moments when you are disturbing phenomena with mental attitudes. You watch yourself twisting reality with mental comments, with stale images and personal opinions. You know what you are doing, when you are doing it. You become increasingly sensitive to the ways in which you miss the true reality, and you gravitate towards the simple objective perspective which does not add to or subtract from what is. You become a very perceptive individual. From this vantage point, all is seen with clarity. The innumerable activities of mind and body stand out in glaring detail. You mindfully observe the incessant rise and fall of breath; you watch an endless stream of bodily sensations and movements; you scan a rapid succession of thoughts and feelings, and you sense the rhythm that echoes from the steady march of time. And in the midst of all this ceaseless movement, there is no watcher, there is only watching.
In this state of perception, nothing remains the same for two consecutive moments. Everything is seen to be in constant transformation. All things are born, all things grow old and die. There are no exceptions. You awaken to the unceasing changes of your own life. You look around and see everything in flux, everything, everything, everything. It is all rising and falling, intensifying and diminishing, coming into existence and passing away. All of life, every bit of it from the infinitesimal to the Indian Ocean, is in motion constantly. You perceive the universe as a great flowing river of experience. Your most cherished possessions are slipping away, and so is your very life. Yet this impermanence is no reason for grief. You stand there transfixed, staring at this incessant activity, and your response is wondrous joy. It's all moving, dancing and full of life.
As you continue to observe these changes and you see how it all fits together, you become aware of the intimate connectedness of all mental, sensory and affective phenomena. You watch one thought leading to another, you see destruction giving rise to emotional reactions and feelings giving rise to more thoughts. Actions, thoughts, feelings, desires -- you see all of them intimately linked together in a delicate fabric of cause and effect. You watch pleasurable experiences arise and fall and you see that they never last; you watch pain come uninvited and you watch yourself anxiously struggling to throw it off; you see yourself fail. It all happens over and over while you stand back quietly and just watch it all work.
Out of this living laboratory itself comes an inner and unassailable conclusion. You see that your life is marked by disappointment and frustration, and you clearly see the source. These reactions arise out of your own inability to get what you want, your fear of losing what you have already gained and your habit of never being satisfied with what you have. These are no longer theoretical concepts -- you have seen these things for yourself and you know that they are real. You perceive your own fear, your own basic insecurity in the face of life and death. It is a profound tension that goes all the way down to the root of thought and makes all of life a struggle. You watch yourself anxiously groping about, fearfully grasping for something, anything, to hold onto in the midst of all these shifting sands, and you see that there is nothing to hold onto, nothing that doesn't change.
You see the pain of loss and grief, you watch yourself being forced to adjust to painful developments day after day in your own ordinary existence. You witness the tensions and conflicts inherent in the very process of everyday living, and you see how superficial most of your concerns really are. You watch the progress of pain, sickness, old age and death. You learn to marvel that all these horrible things are not fearful at all. They are simply reality.
Through this intensive study of the negative aspects of your existence, you become deeply acquainted with dukkha, the unsatisfactory nature of all existence. You begin to perceive dukkha at all levels of our human life, from the obvious down to the most subtle. You see the way suffering inevitably follows in the wake of clinging, as soon as you grasp anything, pain inevitably follows. Once you become fully acquainted with the whole dynamic of desire, you become sensitized to it. You see where it rises, when it rises and how it affects you. You watch it operate over and over, manifesting through every sense channel, taking control of the mind and making consciousness its slave.
In the midst of every pleasant experience, you watch your own craving and clinging take place. In the midst of unpleasant experiences, you watch a very powerful resistance take hold. You do not block these phenomena, you just watch them, you see them as the very stuff of human thought. You search for that thing you call 'me', but what you find is a physical body and how you have identified your sense of yourself with that bag of skin and bones. You search further and you find all manner of mental phenomena, such as emotions, thought patterns and opinions, and see how you identify the sense of yourself with each of them. You watch yourself becoming possessive, protective and defensive over these pitiful things and you see how crazy that is. You rummage furiously among these various items, constantly searching for yourself--physical matter, bodily sensations, feelings and emotions--it all keeps whirling round and round as you root through it, peering into every nook and cranny, endlessly hunting for 'me'.
You find nothing. In all that collection of mental hardware in this endless stream of ever-shifting experience all you can find is innumerable impersonal processes which have been caused and conditioned by previous processes. There is no static self to be found; it is all process. You find thoughts but no thinker, you find emotions and desires, but nobody doing them. The house itself is empty. There is nobody home.
Your whole view of self changes at this point. You begin to look upon yourself as if you were a newspaper photograph. When viewed with the naked eyes, the photograph you see is a definite image. When viewed through a magnifying glass, it all breaks down into an intricate configuration of dots. Similarly, under the penetrating gaze of mindfulness, the feeling of self, an 'I' or 'being' anything, loses its solidity and dissolves. There comes a point in insight meditation where the three characteristics of existence--impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and selflessness-- come rushing home with concept-searing force. You vividly experience the impermanence of life, the suffering nature of human existence, and the truth of no self. You experience these things so graphically that you suddenly awake to the utter futility of craving, grasping and resistance. In the clarity and purity of this profound moment, our consciousness is transformed. The entity of self evaporates. All that is left is an infinity of interrelated non-personal phenomena which are conditioned and ever changing. Craving is extinguished and a great burden is lifted. There remains only an effortless flow, without a trace of resistance or tension. There remains only peace, and blessed Nibbana, the uncreated, is realized.
* (End) *
J Krishnamurti:
“In the gap between subject and object lies the entire misery of humankind.”
- J. Krishnamurti
So
we are asking is there a holistic awareness of all the senses, therefore
there is never asking for the 'more'. I wonder if you follow all this
?. Are we together in this even partially? And where there is this
total - fully aware - of all the senses, awareness of it - not you
are aware of it.... the awareness of the senses in themselves - then
there is no centre - in which there is awareness of the wholeness.
If you consider it, you will see that to suppress the senses... is
contradictory, conflicting, sorrowful.... To understand the truth
you must have complete sensitivity. Do you understand Sirs? Reality
demands your whole being; you must come to it with your body, mind,
and heart as a total human being..... Insight is complete total attention....
When this is a fact not an idea, then dualism and division between
observer and observed comes to an end. The observer is the observed
- they are not separate states. The observer and the observed are
a joint phenomenon and when you experience that directly then you
will find that the thing which you have dreaded as emptiness which
makes you seek escape into various forms of sensation including religion
- ceases and you are able to face it and be it.
-
Collection of K teachings from the KFT CDROM
Watch
what is happening inside you, do not think, but just watch, do not
move your eye-balls, just keep them very, very quiet, because there
is nothing to see now, you have seen all the things around you, now
you are seeing what is happening inside your mind, and to see what
is happening inside your mind, you have to be very quiet inside. And
when you do this, do you know what happens to you? You become very
sensitive, you become very alert to things outside and inside. Then
you find out that the outside is the inside, then you find out that
the observer is the observed.
- Pg 36, K on education
As
long as there is the thinker and the thought, there must be duality.
As long as there is a seeker who is seeking, there must be duality.
As long as there is an experiencer and the thing to be experienced,
there must be duality. So duality exists when there is the observer
and the observed. That is, as long as there is a centre, the censor,
the observer, the thinker, the seeker, the experiencer as the centre,
there must be the opposite.
-
Talks by Krishnamurty in India 1966 p.72
Liberation
is not an end. Liberation is from moment to moment in the understanding
of 'what is'-when the mind is free, not made free.
-
Krishnamurti's Talks 1949-1950 (Verbatim Report)
...India p.22
Are
not the thinker and his thought an inseparable phenomenon? Why do
we separate the thought from the thinker? Is it not one of the cunning
tricks of the mind so that the thinker can change his garb according
to circumstances, yet remain the same? Outwardly there is the appearance
of change but inwardly the thinker continues to be as he is. The craving
for continuity, for permanency, creates this division between the
thinker and his thoughts. When the thinker and his thought become
inseparable then only is duality transcended. Only then is there the
true religious experience. Only when the thinker ceases is there Reality.
This inseparable unity of the thinker and his thought is to be experienced
but not to be speculated upon. This experience is liberation; in it
there is inexpressible joy.
-
Authentic Report of Sixteen Talks given in 1945 & 1946 ...p.14.
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What Keeps Us Focused on Thoughts
Question: Since I composed these questions yesterday, I've been able to briefly see them as just thoughts, but they are definitely strong enough to re-appear as reality to a separate me.
John Wheeler: The key to all this is deeper than seeing that 'everything is just thoughts'. You need to precede that with an understanding of something solid and positive within you. Telling a man with no sense of something greater available that 'everything is just thought' is pretty much useless. Even if he tries to detach from thought there is nothing really to take its place. So he is bound to continue to cling onto some other manifestation of the mind in the attempt to find some kind of peace or stability.
It is good to have a sense of something clear, steady and positive in the picture. Without this to anchor you and give you something as an alternative to the mind's concepts, there is not much chance of really letting go of the mind. We cling to the mind and thoughts out of a simple desire to find happiness, obtain security, know what is real, and so on. Attachment to the mind arises because we are not clear on the source of joy and happiness.
Not knowing our true nature, which is peace itself, we have turned to the mind for the answers. The mind has provided all kinds of ideas and concepts about who we are and what is the way to peace. It is through ignorance that the innate desire for happiness keeps us focused on thoughts. In discovering our true nature, there is a profound shift of experience because we tap directly into the source of peace, clarity, and certitude. Then the focus on the mind naturally falls off because we see that it is not delivering the freedom, which is now our direct experience. Without this understanding, trying to get free of the mind is pretty much an exercise in futility.
So, I would ask: How are you doing with understanding your true nature? I am referring to that sense of your presence, which is steady and clear within you. It is also the awareness which is permeating all thoughts, feelings and sensations. It is inherently peaceful and free. As the recognition of this dawns, your experience shifts from spinning in the clouds of thought to a natural abidance in something light and clear in the middle of all your experiences and activities.
Based on what Thusness said years ago: http://awakeningtoreality.blogspot.com/2007/07/spell-of-karmic-propensities.html
....How can naked awareness lead to the insight of our "Propensities"?
Space, time, life, death, in and out are all ‘deeply held’ impressions. We
are seldom aware of the “deeply held” until we are able to rest
adequately in naked awareness. The nakedness creates the big contrast
that provides us the condition for the arising of the insight of the
'deeply held'. The insight into the full power of our ‘propensities’
and resting in naked awareness are both equally crucial in our
understanding of our non-dual (no subject-object duality, no separate
permanently existing self) and empty (interdependently originated) nature.
To
consciousness 'propensities' (deep conditioning or imprints) are all
that matters. It is the only 'force' that blinds, bonds and prevents a
liberating experience. Once formed it remains latent and only surface
when conditions are riped for fruition. We are unable to get rid of it
by will. Therefore to know consciousness, it is also to know the impact
of deep conditioning, how it is formed and how it subsides. There is
really no 'why', it is just how consciousness works.
If we drop our body, we experience astral body.
If we drop our thoughts, we experience “I AM”.
If we drop ‘I’, we experience non-duality.
Every
major dropping results in a totally new experiential reality. Perhaps
that is why Lao Tze teaches us to eliminate until none to experience
Tao.
To drop the bondage/deep
conditionings, the mind MUST realise that another way of 'knowing' is
possible; an effortless, total sensing and experience of wholeness.
Next the experiences of the joy, bliss and clarity of wholeness.
Without the insight into the possiblity and the experience of the
positive factors, the mind will not release itself from holding.
Even
open pure and innocent inquiry is a deep conditioning. Makes the mind
chatters incessantly. Every what, when, where and why by itself is a
distancing from start. Freeing itself from such mode of inquiry aka
'knowing', the mind rests. The joy of this resting must be experienced
for the 'willingness' to arise.
P.S. there are different types of meditative bliss/joy/rapture.
Like
samatha meditation, each jhana state represents a stage of bliss
associated with certain level of concentration; the bliss experienced
from insight into our nature differs.
The
happiness and pleasure experience by a dualistic mind is different from
that experienced by a practitioner. “I AMness” is a higher form of
happiness as compared to a dualistic mind that continuously chatters.
It is a level of bliss associated with a state of ‘transcendence’ – a
state of bliss resulting from the experience of “formlessness,
odorless, colorless, attributeless and thoughtlessness’.
Mindfulness
The Buddha spoke a lot about mindfulness. Because it's an important mental factor to develop, we need to understand it in the proper context.
In our practice, we are aiming for liberation. We want to be free of all unsatisfactory conditions and their causes. This involves developing wisdom and understanding the nature of our reality. Mindfulness plays a big part in that. It's necessary for developing ethical conduct, concentration, and wisdom as well as for remembering our long-term goal.
In terms of ethical conduct, we need to be mindful of what kinds of actions, words, and thoughts we want our body, speech, and mind to be engaged in and to be mindful what actions our body, speech, and mind are actually engaged in. That way we can monitor our behavior, checking to see if we are acting according to our aspirations.
We try to be mindful during the day of what we're doing, what we're saying, what we're thinking, and feeling. But simply being aware is not enough. When we notice a corrupted mental state or harmful action or negative words, we need to apply the antidote and to bring our mind and thus our body and speech back in line with our goal.
Being aware and directing our body, speech, and mind in a positive direction for the purpose of liberation and enlightenment is a tall call to do daily on a moment-to-moment basis.
The body and speech don't move without the mind moving. In other words, the mind is the root of all actions. Nonetheless, it is easier to correct the harmful actions of body and speech first. It's good to start focusing our mindfulness on them, particularly on our speech.
Speech is a powerful tool that can bring devastation or benefit, so it's important to be careful with what we say. Let's practice being aware of what we're saying, why we're saying it, how we're saying it, how much we're speaking, and about what topics we speak. Let's remember that our motivation in speaking is to benefit self and others.
By practicing in this way, our mindfulness grows and takes us step by step towards our goal of liberation and enlightenment.
e-teaching by Venerable Thubten Chodron
Get a copy of 'Tibetan book of the living and dying' The book itself is self explainatory if not then it is still a good read.