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) *