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)
*