smells

marcteng SG

When I smell something unpleasant, like garbage and bad air, I feel very agitated and angry.

Is there a way where you can practise when you smell something unpleasant, wont have these kind of thoughts?

I have a neighbour who burn incense everyday without fail, once in morning and once at night and filled the whole corridor with the incense, but I find the incense really smelly and unpleasant and I felt pissed and angry whenever I smelled by the incense smell Mad

An Eternal Now SG

You should practise guarding your six sense doors... if you can find ways to solve the situation and and block your house from the smell, that's best. But if not, and you give rise to more mental aversion, that is not going to solve anything and instead increase your suffering. So it is a good time to practise contemplating the dharma and also to practise the patience paramita.

Please read:
http://www.fsnewsletter.net/62/lee.htm

Reading the Heart

From Looking Inward by Upasika Kee Nanayon.
Translated from the Thai by Ajahn Thanissaro.

Exceprt (please read the article in full through the URL above):

"...If you contemplate mental and physical events to see how they arise and disband right in the here and now, and don't get involved with external things - like sights making contact with the eyes, or sounds with the ears - then there really aren't a lot of issues. The mind can be at normalcy, at equilibrium - calm and undisturbed by defilement or the stresses that come from sensory contact. It can look after itself and maintain its balance. You'll come to sense that if you're aware right at awareness in and of itself, without going out to get involved in external things like the mental labels and thoughts that will tend to arise, the mind will see their constant arising and disbanding - and won't be embroiled in anything. This way it can be disengaged, empty, and free. But if it goes out to label things as good or evil, as 'me' or 'mine,' or gets attached to anything, it'll become unsettled and disturbed.

You have to know that if the mind can be still, totally and presently aware, and capable of contemplating with every activity, then blatant forms of suffering and stress will dissolve away. Even if they start to form, you can be alert to them and disperse them immediately. Once you see this actually happening - even in only the beginning stages - it can disperse a lot of the confusion and turmoil in your heart. In other words, don't let yourself dwell on the past or latch onto thoughts of the future. As for the events arising and passing away in the present, you have to leave them alone. Whatever your duties, simply do them as you have to - and the mind won't get worked up about anything. It will be able, to at least some extent, to be empty and still

If you can take your stance at awareness, if you're skilled at looking, the mind can be at peace. You'll know how things arise and disband. First practice keeping awareness right within yourself so that your mindfulness can be firm, without being affected by the objects of sensory contact, so that it won't label things as good or bad, pleasing or displeasing. You have to keep checking to see that when the mind can be at normalcy, centred and neutral as its primary stance, then - whatever it knows or sees - it will be able to contemplate and let go

The sensations in the mind that we explain at such length are still on the level of labels. Only when there can be awareness right at awareness will you really be able to know that the mind that is aware of awareness in this way doesn't send its knowing outside of this awareness. There are no issues. Nothing can be concocted in the mind when it knows in this way. In other words,

An inward-staying
unentangled knowing,
All outward-going knowing
cast aside

The only thing you have to work at maintaining is the state of mind at normalcy - knowing, seeing, and still in the present. If you don't maintain it, if you don't keep looking after it, then when sensory contact comes it will have an effect. The mind will go out with labels of good and bad, liking and disliking. So make sure you maintain the basic awareness that's aware right at yourself. And don't let there be any labelling. No matter what sort of sensory contact comes, you have to make sure that this awareness comes first.

If you train yourself correctly in this way, everything will stop. You won't go straying out through your senses of sight, hearing, etc. The mind will stop and look, stop and be aware right at awareness, so as to know the truth that all things arise and disband. There's no real truth to anything. Only our stupidity is what latches onto things, giving them meanings and then suffering for it - suffering because of its ignorance, suffering because of its unacquaintance with the five aggregates - form, feelings, perceptions, thought-formations, and consciousness - all of which are inconstant, stressful, and not-self....."

An Eternal Now SG

With right mindfulness we can contemplate the emptiness of the 5 skhandas.

An old article by my local dharma teacher --

Thusness SG

If you find naked awareness difficult for now, it may help if you examine your perception and the aversion of "superstitious" and "incense". The "unpleasant smell' is the experiential reality of your aversion. Once formed, it is difficult to get rid.