- Mindfulness: The Path to the Deathless
- The Meditation Teaching of
Venerable Ajahn Sumedho
Investigation
What is Meditation?
The word meditation is a much used word these days, covering a wide range of practices.
In Buddhism it designates two kinds of meditation -- one is called 'samatha', the
other 'vipassana'. Samatha meditation is one of concentrating the mind on an
object, rather than letting it wander off to other things. One chooses an object such as
the sensation of breathing, and puts full attention on the sensations of the inhalation
and exhalation. Eventually through this practice you begin to experience a calm mind --
and you become tranquil because you are cutting off all other impingements that come
through the senses.
The objects that you use for tranquillity are tranquillising
(needless to say!). If you want to have an excited mind, then go to something that is
exciting, don't go to a Buddhist monastery, go to a disco! ... Excitement is easy to
concentrate on, isn't it? It's so strong a vibration that it just pulls you right into it.
You go to the cinema and if it is really an exciting film, you become enthralled by it.
You don't have to exert any effort to watch something that is very exciting or romantic or
adventurous. But if you are not used to it, watching a tranquillising object can be
terribly boring. What is more boring than watching your breath if you are used to more
exciting things? So for this kind of ability, you have to arouse effort from your mind,
because the breath is not interesting, not romantic, not adventurous or scintillating --
it is just as it is. So you have to arouse effort because you're not getting stimulated
from outside.
In this meditation, you are not trying to create any image, but just
to concentrate on the ordinary feeling of your body as it is right now: to sustain and
hold your attention on your breathing. When you do that, the breath becomes more and more
refined, and you calm down ... I know people who have prescribed samatha
meditation for high blood pressure because it calms the heart.
So this is tranquillity practice. You can choose different objects
to concentrate on, training yourself to sustain your attention till you absorb or become
one with the object. You actually feel a sense of oneness with the object you have been
concentrating on, and this is what we call absorption.
The other practice is 'vipassana', or 'insight meditation'.
With insight meditation you are opening the mind up to everything. You are not choosing
any particular object to concentrate on or absorb into, but watching in order to
understand the way things are. Now what we can see about the way things are, is that all
sensory experience is impermanent. Everything you see, hear, smell, taste, touch; all
mental conditions -- your feelings, memories and thoughts -- are changing conditions of
the mind, which arise and pass away. In vipassana, we take this characteristic of
impermanence (or change) as a way of looking at all sensory experience that we can observe
while sitting here.
This is not just a philosophical attitude or a belief in a
particular Buddhist theory: impermanence is to be insightfully known by opening the mind
to watch, and being aware of the way things are. It's not a matter of analysing things by
assuming that things should be a certain way and, when they aren't, then trying to figure
out why things are not the way we think they should be. With insight practice, we are not
trying to analyse ourselves or even trying to change anything to fit our desires. In this
practice we just patiently observe that whatever arises passes away, whether it is mental
or physical.
So this includes the sense organs themselves, the object of the
senses, and the consciousness that arises with their contact. There are also mental
conditions of liking or disliking what we see, smell, taste, feel or touch; the names we
give them; and the ideas, words and concepts we create around sensory experience. Much of
our life is based on wrong assumptions made through not understanding and not really
investigating the way anything is. So life for one who isn't awake and aware tends to
become depressing or bewildering, especially when disappointments or tragedies occur. Then
one becomes overwhelmed because one has not observed the way things are.
In Buddhist terms we use the word Dhamma, or Dharma, which means
'the way it is', 'the natural laws'. When we observe and 'practise the Dhamma', we open
our mind to the way things are. In this way we are no longer blindly reacting to the
sensory experience, but understanding it, and through that comprehension beginning to let
go of it. We begin to free ourselves from just being overwhelmed or blinded and deluded by
the appearance of things. Now to be aware and awake is not a matter of becoming
that way, but of being that way. So we observe the way it is right now, rather
than doing something now to become aware in the future. We observe the body as it is,
sitting here. It all belongs to nature, doesn't it? The human body belongs to the earth,
it needs to be sustained by the things that come out of the earth. You cannot live on just
air or try to import food from Mars and Venus. You have to eat the things that live and
grow on this Earth. When the body dies, it goes back to the earth, it rots and decays and
becomes one with the earth again. It follows the laws of nature, of creation and
destruction, of being born and then dying. Anything that is born doesn't stay permanently
in one state, it grows up, gets old and then dies. All things in nature, even the universe
itself, have their spans of existence, birth and death, beginning and ending. All that we
perceive and can conceive of is change; it is impermanent. So it can never permanently
satisfy you.
In Dhamma practice, we also observe this unsatisfactoriness of
sensory experience. Now just note in your own life that when you expect to be satisfied
from sensory objects or experiences you can only be temporarily satisfied, gratified
maybe, momentarily happy -- and then it changes. This is because there is no point in
sensory consciousness that has a permanent quality or essence. So the sense experience is
always a changing one, and out of ignorance and not understanding, we tend to expect a lot
from it. We tend to demand, hope and create all kinds of things, only to feel terribly
disappointed, despairing, sorrowful and frightened. Those very expectations and hopes take
us to despair, anguish, sorrow and grief, lamentation, old age, sickness and death.
Now this is a way of examining sensory consciousness. The mind can
think in abstractions, it can create all kinds of ideas and images, it can make things
very refined or very coarse. There is a whole gamut of possibilities from very refined
states of blissful happiness and ecstasies to very coarse painful miseries: from Heaven to
Hell, using more picturesque terminology. But there is no permanent Hell and no permanent
Heaven, in fact no permanent state that can be perceived or conceived of. In our
meditation, once we begin to realise the limitations, the unsatisfactoriness, the changing
nature of all sensory experience, we also begin to realise it is not me or mine, it is 'anatta',
not-self.
So, realising this, we begin to free ourselves from identification
with the sensory conditions. Now this is done not through aversion to them, but through
understanding them as they are. It is a truth to be realised, not a belief. 'Anatta'
is not a Buddhist belief but an actual realisation. Now if you don't spend any time in
your life trying to investigate and understand it, you will probably live your whole life
on the assumption that you are your body. Even though you might at some moment think, 'Oh,
I am not the body', you read some kind of inspired poetry or some new philosophical angle.
You might think it is a good idea that one isn't the body, but you haven't really realised
that. Even though some people, intellectuals and so forth, will say, 'We are not the body,
the body is not self', that is easy to say, but to really know that is something
else. Through this practice of meditation, through the investigation and understanding of
the way things are, we begin to free ourselves from attachment. When we no longer expect
or demand, then of course we don't feel the resulting despair and sorrow and grief when we
don't get what we want. So this is the goal -- 'Nibbana', or realisation of non-grasping
of any phenomena that have a beginning and an ending. When we let go of this insidious and
habitual attachment to what is born and dies, we begin to realise the Deathless.
Some people just live their lives reacting to life because they have
been conditioned to do so, like Pavlovian dogs. If you are not awakened to the way things
are, then you really are merely a conditioned intelligent creature rather than a
conditioned stupid dog. You may look down on Pavlov's dogs that salivate when the bell
rings, but notice how we do very similar things. This is because with sensory experience
it is all conditioning, it is not a person, it is no 'soul' or 'personal essence'. These
bodies, feelings, memories and thoughts are perceptions conditioned into the mind through
pain, through having been born as a human being, being born into the families we have, and
the class, race, nationality; dependent on whether we have a male or female body,
attractive or unattractive, and so forth. All these are just the conditions that are not
ours, not me, not mine. These conditions, they follow the laws of nature, the natural
laws. We cannot say, 'I don't want my body to get old' -- well, we can say that, but no
matter how insistent we are, the body still gets old. We cannot expect the body to never
feel pain or get ill or always have perfect vision and hearing. We hope, don't we? 'I hope
I will always be healthy, I will never become an invalid and I will always have good
eyesight, never become blind; have good ears so I will never be one of those old people
that others have to yell at; and that I will never get senile and always have control of
my faculties 'til I die at ninety-five, fully alert, bright, cheerful, and die just in my
sleep without any pain.' That is how we would all like it. Some of us might hold up for a
long time and die in an idyllic way, tomorrow all our eyeballs might fall out. It is
unlikely, but it could happen! However, the burden of life diminishes considerably when we
reflect on the limitations of our life. Then we know what we can achieve, what we can
learn from life. So much human misery comes out of expecting a lot and never quite being
able to get everything one has hoped for.
So in our meditation and insightful understanding of the way things
are, we see that beauty, refinement, pleasure are impermanent conditions -- as well as
pain, misery and ugliness. If you really understand that, then you can enjoy and endure
whatever happens to you. Actually, much of the lesson in life is learning to endure what
we don't like in ourselves and in the world around us; being able to be patient and
kindly, and not make a scene over the imperfections in the sensory experience. We can
adapt and endure and accept the changing characteristics of the sensory birth and death
cycle by letting go and no longer attaching to it. When we free ourselves from identity
with it, we experience our true nature, which is bright, clear, knowing; but is not a
personal thing anymore, it is not 'me' or 'mine' -- there is no attainment or attachment
to it. We can only attach to that which is not ourself!
The Buddha's teachings are merely helpful means, ways of looking at
sensory experience that help us to understand it. They are not commandments, they are not
religious dogmas that we have to accept or believe in. They are merely guides to point to
the way things are. So we are not using the Buddha's teachings to grasp them as an end in
themselves, but only to remind ourselves to be awake, alert and aware that all that arises
passes away.
This is a continuous, constant observation and reflection on the
sensory world, because the sensory world has a powerfully strong influence. Having a body
like this with the society we live in, the pressures on all of us are fantastic.
Everything moves so quickly -- television and the technology of the age, the cars --
everything tends to move at a very fast pace. It is all very attractive, exciting and
interesting, and it all pulls your senses out. Just notice when you go to London how all
the advertisements pull your attention out to whiskey bottles and cigarettes! Your
attention is pulled into things you can buy, always going towards rebirth into sensory
experience. The materialistic society tries to arouse greed so you will spend your money,
and yet never be contented with what you have. There is always something better, something
newer, something more delicious than what was the most delicious yesterday ... it goes on
and on and on, pulling you out into objects of the senses like that.
But when we come into the shrine room, we are not here to look at
each other or to be attracted or pulled into any of the objects in the room, but to use
them for reminding ourselves. We are reminded to either concentrate our minds on a
peaceful object, or open the mind, investigate and reflect on the way things are. We have
to experience this, each one for ourselves. No-one's enlightenment is going to enlighten
any of the rest of us. So this is a movement inwards: not looking outwards for somebody
who is enlightened to make you enlightened. We give this opportunity for encouragement and
guidance so that those of you who are interested in doing this can do so. Here you can,
most of the time, be sure that nobody is going to snatch your purse! These days you can't
count on anything, but there is less risk of it here than if you were sitting in
Piccadilly Circus; Buddhist monasteries are refuges for this kind of opening of the mind.
This is our opportunity as human beings.
As a human being we have a mind that can reflect and observe. You
can observe whether you are happy or miserable. You can observe the anger or jealousy or
confusion in you mind. When you are sitting and feel really confused and upset, there is
that in you which knows it. You might hate it and just blindly react to it, but if you are
more patient you can observe that this is a temporary changing condition of confusion or
anger or greed. But an animal cannot do that; when it is angry it is completely that, lost
in it. Tell an angry cat to watch its anger! I have never been able to get anywhere with
our cat, she cannot reflect on greed. But I can, and I am sure that the rest of
you can. I see delicious food in front of me, and the movement in the mind is the same as
our cat Doris's. But we can observe the animal attraction to things that smell good and
look good.
This is using wisdom by watching that impulse, and understanding it.
That which observes greed is not greed: greed cannot observe itself, but that which is not
greed can observe it. This observing is what we call 'Buddha' or 'Buddha wisdom' --
awareness of the way things are.
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