When Conventional Truths Collapse
In making yourself quiet, you have to be quiet on all fronts—quiet in your deeds, quiet in your words, quiet in your mind. Only then will you be able to contemplate what’s going on inside yourself. If you aren’t quiet, you’ll become involved in external affairs and end up having too much to do and too much to say. This will keep your awareness or mindfulness from holding steady and firm. You have to stop doing, saying, or thinking anything that isn’t necessary. That way your mindfulness will be able to develop continuously. Don’t let yourself get involved in too many outside things.
In training your mindfulness to be continuous so that it will enable you to contemplate yourself, you have to be observant: When there’s sensory contact, can the mind stay continuously undisturbed and at normalcy? Or does it still run out into liking and disliking? Being observant in this way will enable you to read yourself, to know yourself. If mindfulness is firmly established, the mind won’t waver. If it’s not yet firm, the mind will waver in the form of liking and disliking. You have to be wary of even the slightest wavering. Don’t let yourself think that the slight waverings are unimportant, or else they’ll become habitual.
Being uncomplacent means that you have to watch out for the details, the little things, the tiny flaws that arise in the mind. If you can do this, you’ll be able to keep your mind protected—better than giving all your attention to the worthless affairs of the outside world. So really try to be careful. Don’t get entangled in sensory contact. This is something you have to work at mastering. If you focus yourself exclusively in the area of the mind like this, you’ll be able to contemplate feelings in all their details. You’ll be able to see them clearly, to let them go.
So focus your practice right at feelings of pleasure, pain, and neither-pleasure-nor-pain. Contemplate how to leave them alone, simply as feelings, without relishing them—for if you relish feelings, that’s craving. Desires for this and that will seep in and influence the mind so that it gets carried away with inner and outer feelings. This is why you have to be quiet—quiet in a way that doesn’t let the mind become attached to the flavors of feelings, quiet in a way that uproots their influence.
The desire for pleasure is like a virus deep in our character. What we’re doing here is to make the mind stop taking pleasant feelings into itself and stop pushing painful feelings away. It’s because we’re addicted to taking in pleasant feelings that we dislike painful feelings and push them away. So don’t let the mind love pleasure and resist pain. Let it be undisturbed by both. Give it a try. If the mind can let go of feelings so that it’s above pleasure, pain, and indifference, that means it’s not stuck on feeling. And then try to observe: How can it stay unaffected by feelings? This is something you have to work at mastering in order to release your grasp on feelings once and for all, so that you won’t latch onto physical pain or mental distress as being you or yours.
If you don’t release your grasp on feeling, you’ll stay attached to it, both in its physical and in its mental forms. If there’s the pleasure of physical ease, you’ll be attracted to it. As for the purely mental feeling of pleasure, that’s something you’ll really want, you’ll really love. And then you’ll be attracted to the mental perceptions and labels that accompany the pleasure, the thought-fabrications and even the consciousness that accompany the pleasure. You’ll latch onto all of these things as you or yours.
So analyze physical and mental pleasure. Take them apart to contemplate how to let them go. Don’t fool yourself into relishing them. As for pain, don’t push it away. Let pain simply be pain, let pleasure simply be pleasure. Let them simply fall into the category of feelings. Don’t go thinking that you feel pleasure, that you feel pain. If you can let go of feeling in this way, you’ll be able to gain release from suffering and stress because you’ll be above and beyond feeling. This way, when aging, illness, and death come, you won’t latch onto them thinking that you are aging, that you are ill, that you are dying. You’ll be able to release these things from your grasp.
If you can contemplate purely in these terms—that the five aggregates are inconstant, stressful, and not-self—you won’t enter into them and latch onto them as “me” or “mine.” If you don’t analyze them in this way, you’ll be trapped in dying. Even your bones, skin, flesh, and so forth will become “mine.” This is why we’re taught to contemplate death—so that we can make ourselves aware that death doesn’t mean that we die. You have to contemplate until you really know this. Otherwise, you’ll stay trapped right there. You must make yourself sensitive in a way that sees clearly how your bones, flesh, and skin are empty of any self. That way you won’t latch onto them. The fact that you still latch onto them shows that you haven’t really seen into their inconstancy, stress, and not-selfness.
When you see the bones of animals, they don’t have much meaning, but when you see the bones of people, your perception labels them: “That’s a person’s skeleton. That’s a person’s skull.” If there are a lot of them, they can really scare you. When you see the picture of a skeleton or of anything that shows the inconstancy and not-selfness of the body: If you don’t see clear through it, you’ll get stuck at the level of skeleton and bones. Actually, there are no bones at all. They’re empty, nothing but elements. You have to penetrate into the bones so that they’re elements. Otherwise, you’ll get stuck at the level of skeleton. And since you haven’t seen through it, it can make you distressed and upset. This shows that you haven’t penetrated into the Dhamma. You’re stuck at the outer shell because you haven’t analyzed things into their elements.
When days and nights pass by, they’re not the only things that pass by. The body constantly decays and falls apart, too. The body decays bit by bit, but we don’t realize it. Only after it’s decayed a lot—when the hair has gone gray and the teeth fall out—do we realize that it’s old. This is knowledge on a crude and really blatant level. But as for the gradual decaying that goes on quietly inside, we aren’t aware of it.
As a result, we cling to the body as being us—every single part of it. Its eyes are our eyes, the sights they see are the things we see, the sensation of seeing is something we sense. We don’t see these things as elements. Actually, the element of vision and the element of form make contact. The awareness of the contact is the element of consciousness: the mental phenomenon that senses sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, and all. This we don’t realize, which is why we latch onto everything—eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, intellect—as being us or ours. Then, when the body decays, we feel that we are growing old; when it dies and mental phenomena stop, we feel that we die.
Once you’ve taken the elements apart, though, there’s nothing. These things lose their meaning on their own. They’re simply physical and mental elements, without any illness or death. If you don’t penetrate into things this way, you stay deluded and blind. For instance, when we chant “jarā-dhammāmhi”—I am subject to death—that’s simply to make us mindful and uncomplacent in the beginning stages of the practice. When you reach the stage of insight meditation, though, there’s none of that. All assumptions, all conventional truths get ripped away. They all collapse. When the body is empty of self, what is there to latch onto? Physical elements, mental elements, they’re already empty of any self. You have to see this clearly all the way through. Otherwise, they gather together and form a being, both physical and mental, and then we latch onto them as being our self.
Once we see the world as elements, however, there’s no death. And once we can see that there’s no death, that’s when we’ll really know. If we still see that we die, that shows that we haven’t yet seen the Dhamma. We’re still stuck on the outer shell. And when this is the case, what sort of Dhamma can we expect to know? You have to penetrate deeper in, you have to contemplate, taking things apart.
You’re almost at the end of your lease in this burning house and yet you continue latching onto it as your self. It tricks you into feeling fear and love, and when you fall for it, what path will you practice? The mind latches onto these things to fool itself on many, many levels. You can’t see through even these conventions, so you grasp hold of them as your self, as a woman, a man—and you really turn yourself into these things. If you can’t contemplate so as to empty yourself of these conventions and assumptions, your practice simply circles around in the same old place, and as a result you can’t find any way out.
So you have to contemplate down through many levels. It’s like using a cloth to filter things. If you use a coarse weave, you won’t catch much of anything. You have to use a fine weave to filter down to the deeper levels and penetrate into the deeper levels by contemplating over and over again, through level after level. That’s why there are many levels to being mindful and discerning, filtering on in to the details.
And this is why examining and becoming fully aware of your own inner character is so important. The practice of meditation is nothing but catching sight of self-deceptions, to see how they infiltrate into the deepest levels and how even the most blatant levels fool us right before our very eyes. If you can’t catch sight of the deceits and deceptions of the self, your practice won’t lead to release from suffering. It will simply keep you deluded into thinking that everything is you and yours.
To practice in line with the Buddha’s teachings is to go against the flow. Every living being, deep down inside, wants pleasure on the physical level and then on the higher and more subtle levels of feeling, such as the types of concentration that are addicted to feelings of peace and respite. This is why you have to investigate into feeling so that you can let go of it and thus snuff out craving, through being fully aware of feeling as it actually is—free from any self—in line with its nature: unentangled, uninvolved. This is what snuffs out the virus of craving so that ultimately it vanishes without a trace.