WHEN CONVENTIONAL TRUTHS COLLAPSE 
In making yourself quiet, you have to be quiet on all fronts --
quiet in your deeds, quiet in your words, quiet in your mind. Only
then will you be able to contemplate what's going on inside yourself.
If you aren't quiet, you'll become involved in external affairs and
end up having too much to do and too much to say. This will keep your
awareness or mindfulness from holding steady and firm. You have to
stop doing, saying, or thinking anything that isn't necessary. That
way your mindfulness will be able to develop continuously. Don't let
yourself get involved in too many outside things.
In training your mindfulness to be continuously aware so that it
will enable you to contemplate yourself, you have to be observant:
When there's sensory contact, can the mind stay continuously
undisturbed and at normalcy? Or does it still run out into liking and
disliking? Being observant in this way will enable you to read
yourself, to know yourself. If mindfulness is firmly established, the
mind won't waver. If it's not yet firm, the mind will waver in the
form of liking and disliking. You have to be wary of even the
slightest wavering. Don't let yourself think that the slight
waverings are unimportant, or else they'll become habitual.
Being uncomplacent means that you have to watch out for the
details,
the little things, the tiny flaws that arise in the mind. If you can
do this, you'll be able to keep your mind protected -- better than
giving all your attention to the worthless affairs of the outside
world. So really try to be careful. Don't get entangled in sensory
contact. This is something you have to work at mastering. If you
focus yourself exclusively in the area of the mind like this, you'll
be able to contemplate feelings in all their details. You'll be able
to see them clearly, to let them go.
So focus your practice right at feelings of pleasure, pain, and
neither-pleasure-nor-pain. Contemplate how to leave them alone,
simply as feelings, without relishing them -- //for if you relish
feelings, that's craving//. Desires for this and that will seep in
and influence the mind so that it gets carried away with inner and
outer feelings. This is why you have to be quiet -- quiet in a way
that doesn't let the mind become attached to the flavors of feelings,
quiet in a way that uproots their influence.
The desire for pleasure is like a virus deep in our character. What
we're doing here is to make the mind stop taking pleasant feelings
into itself and stop pushing painful feelings away. It's because we're
addicted to taking in pleasant feelings that we dislike painful
feelings and push them away. So don't let the mind love pleasure and
resist pain. Let it be undisturbed by both. Give it a try. If the
mind can let go of feelings so that it's above pleasure, pain, and
indifference, that means it's not stuck on feeling. And then try to
observe: How can it //stay// unaffected by feelings? This is
something you have to work at mastering in order to release your grasp
on feelings once and for all, so that you won't latch onto physical
pain or mental distress as being you or yours.
If you don't release your grasp on feeling, you'll stay attached to
it, both in its physical and in its mental forms. If there's the
pleasure of physical ease, you'll be attracted to it. As for the
purely mental feeling of pleasure, that's something you'll really
want, you'll really love. And then you'll be attracted to the mental
perceptions and labels that accompany the pleasure, the
thought-formations, and even the consciousness that accompany the
pleasure. You'll latch onto all of these things as you or yours.
So analyze physical and mental pleasure. Take them apart to
contemplate how to let them go. Don't fool yourself into relishing
them. As for pain, don't push it away. //Let pain simply be pain,
let pleasure simply be pleasure//. Let them simply fall into the
category of feelings. Don't go thinking that //you// feel pleasure,
that //you// feel pain. If you can let go of feeling in this way,
you'll be able to gain release from suffering and stress //because
you'll be above and beyond feeling//. This way when ageing, illness,
and death come, you won't latch onto them thinking that //you// are
ageing, that //you// are ill, that //you// are dying. You'll be able
to release these things from your grasp.
If you can contemplate purely in these terms -- that the five
aggregates are inconstant, stressful, and not-self -- you won't enter
into them and latch onto them as "me" or "mine."
If you don't analyze
them in this way, you'll be trapped in dying. Even your bones, skin,
flesh, and so forth will become "mine." This is why we're
taught to
contemplate death -- so that we can make ourselves aware that death
doesn't mean that //we// die. You have to contemplate until you
really know this. Otherwise you'll stay trapped right there. You
must make yourself sensitive in a way that sees clearly how your
bones, flesh, and skin are empty of any self. That way you won't
latch onto them. The fact that you still latch onto them shows that
you haven't really seen into their inconstancy, stress, and
not-selfness.
When you see the bones of animals, they don't have much meaning,
but
when you see the bones of people, your perception labels them:
"That's
a person's skeleton. That's a person's skull." If there are a lot
of
them, they can really scare you. When you see the picture of a
skeleton or of anything that shows the inconstancy and not-selfness of
the body: If you don't see clear through it, you'll get stuck at the
level of skeleton and bones. Actually, there are no bones at all.
They're empty, nothing but elements. You have to penetrate into the
bones so that they're elements. Otherwise you'll get stuck at the
level of skeleton. And since you haven't seen through it, it can make
you distressed and upset. This shows that you haven't penetrated into
the Dhamma. You're stuck at the outer shell because you haven't
analyzed things into their elements.
When days and nights pass by, they're not the only things that pass
by. The body constantly decays and falls apart, too. The body decays
bit by bit, but we don't realize it. Only after it's decayed a lot --
when the hair has gone grey and teeth fall out -- do we realize that
it's old. This is knowledge on a crude and really blatant level. But
as for the gradual decaying that goes on quietly inside, we aren't
aware of it.
As a result, we cling to the body as being us -- every single part
of it. Its eyes are //our// eyes, the sights they see are the things
//we// see, the sensation of seeing is something //we// sense. We
don't see these things as elements. Actually the element of vision
and the element of form make contact. The awareness of the contact is
the element of consciousness: the mental phenomenon that senses
sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, and all. This we
don't realize, which is why we latch onto everything -- eyes, ears,
nose, tongue, body, intellect -- as being us or ours. Then when the
body decays, we feel that //we// are growing old; when it dies and
mental phenomena stop, we feel that //we// die.
Once you've taken the elements apart, though, there's nothing.
These things lose their meaning on their own. //They're simply
physical and mental elements, without any illness or death//. If you
don't penetrate into things this way, you stay deluded and blind. For
instance, when we chant //"jara-dhammamhi"// -- I am subject
to death
-- that's simply to make us mindful and uncomplacent in the beginning
stages of the practice. When you reach the stage of insight
meditation, though, there's none of that. All assumptions, all
conventional truths get ripped away. They all collapse. When the body
is empty of self, what is there to latch onto? Physical elements,
mental elements, they're already empty of any self. You have to see
this clearly all the way through. Otherwise they gather together and
form a being, both physical and mental, and then we latch onto them as
being our self.
Once we see the world as elements, however, there's no death. And
once we can see that there's no death, that's when we'll really
//know//. If we still see that we die, that shows that we haven't yet
seen the Dhamma. We're still stuck on the outer shell. And when this
is the case, what sort of Dhamma can we expect to know? You have to
penetrate deeper in, you have to contemplate, taking things apart.
You're almost at the end of your lease in this burning house, and
yet you continue latching onto it as your self. It tricks you into
feeling fear and love, and when you fall for it, what path will you
practice? The mind latches onto these things to fool itself on many,
many levels. You can't see through even //these// conventions, so you
grasp hold of them as your self, as a woman, a man -- and you really
turn yourself into these things. If you can't contemplate so as to
empty yourself of these conventions and assumptions, your practice
simply circles around in the same old place, and as a result you can't
find any way out.
So you have to contemplate down through many levels. It's like
using
a cloth to filter things. If you use a coarse weave, you won't catch
much of anything. You have to use a fine weave to filter down to the
deeper levels and penetrate //into// the deeper levels by
contemplating over and over again, through level after level. That's
why there are many levels to being mindful and discerning, filtering
on in to the details.
And this is why examining and becoming fully aware of your own
inner
character is so important. The practice of meditation is nothing but
catching sight of self-deceptions, to see how they infiltrate into the
deepest levels, and to see how even the most blatant levels fool us
right before our very eyes. If you can't catch sight of the deceits
and deceptions of the self, your practice won't lead to release from
suffering. It will simply keep you deluded into thinking that
everything is you and yours.
To practice in line with the Buddha's teachings is to go
//against//
the flow. Every living being, deep down inside, wants pleasure on the
physical level and then on the higher and more subtle levels of
feeling, such as the types of concentration that are stuck on feelings
of peace and respite. This is why you have to investigate into
feeling so that you can let go of it and thus snuff out craving,
through being fully aware of feeling as it actually is -- free from
any self -- in line with its nature: unentangled, uninvolved. This
is what snuffs out the virus of craving so that ultimately it vanishes
without a trace.
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