(continued fr previous)
So, studying with him, I had to learn to take risks in the midst of
uncertainties. If something interesting came up in the practice,
I'd have to stick with it, observing it over time, before reaching
any conclusions about it. Even then, I learned, the labels I
applied to my experiences couldn't be chiseled in rock. They had to
be more like post-it notes: convenient markers for my own reference
that I might have to peel off and stick elsewhere as I became more
familiar with the territory of my mind. This proved to be a
valuable lesson that applied to all areas of my practice.
Still, Ajaan Fuang didn't leave me to reinvent the dharma wheel
totally on my own. Experience had shown him that some approaches to
concentration worked better than others for putting the mind in a
position where it could exercise its ingenuity and accurately judge
the results of its experiments, and he was very explicit in
recommending those approaches. Among the points he emphasized were
these:
Strong concentration is absolutely necessary for liberating
insight. "Without a firm basis in concentration," he often said,
"insight is just concepts." To see clearly the connections between
stress and its causes, the mind has to be very steady and still.
And to stay still, it requires the strong sense of well being that
only strong concentration can provide.
To gain insight into a state of concentration, you have to stick
with it for a long time. If you push impatiently from one level of
concentration to the next, or if you try to analyze a new state of
concentration too quickly after you've attained it, you never give
it the chance to show its full potential and you don't give
yourself the chance to familiarize yourself with it. So you have to
keep working at it as a skill, something you can tap into in all
situations. This enables you to see it from a variety of
perspectives and to test it over time, to see if it really is as
totally blissful, empty, and effortless as it may have seemed on
first sight.
The best state of concentration for the sake of developing
all-around insight is one that encompasses a whole-body awareness.
There were two exceptions to Ajaan Fuang's usual practice of not
identifying the state you had attained in your practice, and both
involved states of wrong concentration. The first was the state
that comes when the breath gets so comfortable that your focus
drifts from the breath to the sense of comfort itself, your
mindfulness begins to blur, and your sense of the body and your
surroundings gets lost in a pleasant haze. When you emerge, you
find it hard to identify where exactly you were focused. Ajaan
Fuang called this moha-samadhi, or delusion-concentration.
The second state was one I happened to hit one night when my
concentration was extremely one-pointed, and so refined that it
refused settle on or label even the most fleeting mental objects. I
dropped into a state in which I lost all sense of the body, of any
internal/external sounds, or of any thoughts or perceptions at all
although there was just enough tiny awareness to let me know,
when I emerged, that I hadn't been asleep. I found that I could
stay there for many hours, and yet time would pass very quickly.
Two hours would seem like two minutes. I could also "program"
myself to come out at a particular time.
After hitting this state several nights in a row, I told Ajaan
Fuang about it, and his first question was, "Do you like it?" My
answer was "No," because I felt a little groggy the first time I
came out. "Good," he said. "As long as you don't like it, you're
safe. Some people really like it and think it's nibbana or
cessation. Actually, it's the state of non-perception
(asaññi-bhava). It's not even right concentration, because there's
no way you can investigate anything in there to gain any sort of
discernment. But it does have other uses." He then told me of the
time he had undergone kidney surgery and, not trusting the
anesthesiologist, had put himself in that state for the duration of
the operation.
In both these states of wrong concentration, the limited range of
awareness was what made them wrong. If whole areas of your
awareness are blocked off, how can you gain all-around insight? And
as I've noticed in years since, people adept at blotting out large
areas of awareness through powerful one-pointedness also tend to be
psychologically adept at dissociation and denial. This is why Ajaan
Fuang, following Ajaan Lee, taught a form of breath meditation that
aimed at an all-around awareness of the breath energy throughout
the body, playing with it to gain a sense of ease, and then calming
it so that it wouldn't interfere with a clear vision of the subtle
movements of the mind. This all-around awareness helped to
eliminate the blind spots where ignorance likes to lurk.
An ideal state of concentration for giving rise to insight is one
that you can analyze in terms of stress and the absence of stress
even while you're in it. Once your mind was firmly established in a
state of concentration, Ajaan Fuang would recommend "lifting" it
from its object, but not so far that the concentration was
destroyed. From that perspective, you could evaluate what levels of
stress were still present in the concentration and let them go. In
the initial stages, this usually involved evaluating how you were
relating to the breath, and detecting more subtle levels of breath
energy in the body that would provide a basis for deeper levels of
stillness. Once the breath was perfectly still, and the sense of
the body started dissolving into a formless mist, this process
would involve detecting the perceptions of "space," "knowing,"
"oneness," etc., that would appear in place of the body and could
be peeled away like the layers of an onion in the mind. In either
case, the basic pattern was the same: detecting the level of
perception or mental fabrication that was causing the unnecessary
stress, and dropping it for a more subtle level of perception or
fabrication until there was nothing left to drop.
This was why, as long as your awareness was still and alert
all-around, it didn't matter whether you were in the first or the
fourteenth jhana, for the way you treated your state of
concentration was always the same. By directing your attention to
issues of stress and its absence, he was pointing you to terms by
which to evaluate your state of mind for yourself, without having
to ask any outside authority. And, as it turns out, the terms you
can evaluate for yourself stress, its cause, its cessation, and
the path to its cessation are the issues that define the four
noble truths: the right view that the Buddha says can lead to total
liberation.
