PURE MIND

The Sound of Stillness

‘All that is subject to arising, is subject to ceasing.’

If you profoundly understand and know that all that is subject to arising is subject to ceasing. Then you will realise the ultimate reality, the deathless, immor­tal truths.

Proper meditation is a commitment to wise investigation.  It involves a courageous effort to look deeply into things. Not analyzing yourself and making judg­ments about why you suffer on a personal level. But resolving to really follow the path until you have profound under­standing. Such perfect understanding is based upon the pat­tern of arising and ceasing. Once this law is understood, everything is seen as fitting into that pattern.

MORTALITY AND CESSATION

With the reflection upon the Noble Truths, we bring into consciousness this very problem of human existence. We look at this sense of alienation and blind attachment to sensory consciousness. Out of ignorance, we attach to desires for sense pleasures. When we identify with what is mortal or death-bound, and with what is unsatisfactory, that very attachment is suffering.

Sense pleasures are all mortal pleasures. Whatever we see, hear, touch, taste, think or feel is mortal – death-bound. So, when we attach to the mortal senses, we attach to death.

Whatever we attach to in these three kinds of desires, we’re attaching to death – which means that we’re going to experience disappointment or despair.

Death of the mind is despair; depression is a kind of death experience of the mind. Just as the body dies a physical death, the mind dies. Mental states and mental conditions die; we call it despair, boredom, depression and anguish. Whenever we attach, to boredom, despair, anguish and sorrow, we tend to seek some other mortal condition that’s arising. This is ‘becoming’.

We are blinded, caught in this becoming process on the sensual plane. But through knowing desire without judging the beauty or ugliness of the sensual plane, we come to see desire as it is. There is knowing. Then, by laying aside these desires rather than grasping at them, we experience nirodha, the cessation of suffering. This is the Third Noble Truth which we must realise for ourselves. We contemplate cessation. We say, ‘There is cessation’, and we know when something has ceased.

ALLOWING THINGS TO ARISE

Before you can let things go, you have to admit them into full consciousness. In meditation, our aim is to skillfully allow the subconscious to arise into consciousness. All the despair, fears, anguish, suppression and anger are allowed to become con­scious. There is a tendency in people to hold on to very high- minded ideals. We can become very disappointed in ourselves because sometimes we feel we are not as good as we should be or we should not feel angry – all the shoulds and should nots.

Then we create desire to get rid of the bad things – and this desire has a righteous quality. It seems right to get rid of bad thoughts, anger and jealousy because a good person ‘should not be like that’. Thus, we create guilt.

In reflecting on this, we bring into consciousness the desire to become this ideal and the desire to get rid of these bad things. And by doing that, we can let go – so that rather than becoming perfect, you let go of that desire. What is left is the PURE MIND. There is no need to become the perfect person because the pure mind is where perfect people arise and cease.

Cessation is easy to understand on an intellectual level, but to realise it may be quite difficult because this entails abiding with what we think we cannot bear.

I had started to remember in meditation all the things I deliberately tried to forget. Memories from childhood and adolescence kept coming up in my mind; then this anger and hatred became so conscious it just seemed to overwhelm me. All the hatred and anger that had been suppressed in thirty years of living rose to its peak at this time, and it burned itself out and ceased through meditation. It was a process of purification.

To allow this process of cessation to work, we must be willing to suffer. This is why I. stress the importance of patience. We have to open our minds to suffering because it is in embracing suffering that suffering ceases. When we find that we are suffering, physically or mentally, then we go to the actual suffering that is present.

We open completely to it, welcome it, concentrate on it, allowing it to be what it is. That means we must be patient and bear with the unpleasantness of a particular condition. We have to endure boredom, despair, doubt and fear in order to understand that they cease rather than running away from them.

As long as we do not allow things to cease, we just create new kamma that just reinforces our habits. When something arises, we grasp it and proliferate around it; and this compli­cates everything. Then these things will be repeated and repeated throughout our lives – we cannot go around following our desires and fears and expect to realise peace. We contem­plate fear and desire so that these do not delude us anymore: we have to know what is deluding us before we can let it go. Desire and fear are to be known as impermanent, unsatisfac­tory and not-self. They are understood so that suffering can bum itself away.

It is very important here to differentiate between cessation and annihilation – the desire that comes into the mind to get rid of something. Cessation is the natural ending of any con­dition that has arisen. So, it is not desire! It is not something that we create in the mind, but it is the end of that which began, the death of that which is born. Therefore, cessation is not a self – it does not come about from a sense of ‘I have to get rid of things,’ but when we allow that which has arisen to cease. To do that, one has to abandon craving – let it go. It does not mean rejecting or throwing away but abandoning means let­ting go of it.

Then, when it has ceased, you experience nirodha – cess­ation, emptiness, non-attachment. Nirodha is another word for Nibbana. When you have let something go and allowed it to cease, then what is left is peace.

We can experience that peace through our medita­tion. When you’ve let desire end in your own mind, that which is left over is very peaceful. That is true peacefulness, the Deathless. When you really know that as it is, the Truth of Cessation, in which there is no self but there is still alertness and clarity. The real meaning of bliss is that peaceful, transcendent consciousness.

I always had a tremendous fear of rejection (Merlyn Porter). I never even thought of it until that particular memory kept rising up into my consciousness during meditation. The rational mind knows that it is ridiculous to go around thinking about the tragedies of childhood. But if they keep coming up into consciousness when you are middle-aged, maybe they are trying to tell you something about assumptions that were formed when you were a child.

When you begin to feel memories or obsessive fears com­ing up in meditation, rather than becoming frustrated or upset by them. See them as something to be accepted into conscious­ness so that you can let them go. The desire or obsession moves – and it moves to cessation. It ends. And then you have the insight that there is the cessation of desire. So, the third aspect of the Third Noble Truth is: cessation has been realized.

REALISATION

This is to be realized. The Buddha said emphatically: ‘This is a Truth to be realized here and now.’ We do not have to wait until we die to find out if it’s all true – this teaching is for living human beings like ourselves. Each one of us has to realise it. I may tell you about it and encourage you to do it but I can’t make you realise it!

Do not think of it as something remote or beyond your ability. When we talk about Dhamma or Truth. We say that it is here and now, and something we can see for ourselves. We can turn to it; we can incline towards the Truth. We can pay attention to the way it is, at this time and this place. That’s mindfulness – being alert and bringing attention to the way it is. Through mindfulness, we investigate the sense of self, this sense of me and mine: my body, my feelings, my memories, my thoughts, my views, my opinions, my house, my car and so on.

When there is arrogance, conceit or self-disparagement – examine it; listen inwardly:

‘I am….’ Be aware and attentive to the space before you think it; then think it and notice the space that follows. Sustain your attention on that emptiness at the end and see how long you can hold your attention on it.

See if you can hear a kind of ringing sound in the mind, the sound of silence/stillness, the primordial sound. When you concentrate your attention on that, you can reflect: ‘Is there any sense of self?’ You see that when you are really empty – when there is just clarity, alertness and attention – there’s no self. There’s no sense of me and mine.

So, I go to that empty state, and I contemplate Dhamma: I think, ‘This is just as it is. This body here is just this way.’ I can give it a name or not but right now, it is just this way. It is not Sumedho!

Whether it succeeds or fails is no longer important in the same way. In emptiness, things are just what they are. When we are aware in this way. It doesn’t mean that we are indifferent to success or failure and that we do not bother to do anything. We can apply ourselves. We know what we can do; we know what has to be done and we can do it in the right way. Then everything becomes Dhamma, the way it is. We do things because that is the right thing to be doing at this time and in this place rather than out of a sense of personal ambition or fear of failure.

But an arahant is simply a human being who has perfected life, someone who has learned everything there is to learn through the basic law: ‘All that is subject to arising is subject to ceasing.’ An arahant does not need to know every­thing about everything; it is only necessary to know and fully understand this law.

We use Buddha wisdom to contemplate Dhamma, the way things are. We take Refuge in Sangha, in that which is doing good and refraining from doing evil. Sangha is one thing, a community. It is not a group of individual personalities or different characters. The sense of being an individual person or a man or a woman is no longer important to us. This sense of Sangha is realized as a Refuge. There is that unity so that even though the manifestations are all individual, our realisa­tion is the same.

Through being awake, alert and no longer attached, we realise cessation and we abide in PURE MIND or emptiness where we all merge. There is no person there. People may arise and cease in the emptiness, but there’s no person.

There is just clarity, awareness, peacefulness and purity.

Freedom Feelings:

Fear – Despair – Loneliness – Sadness – Doubt – Misunderstood – Angry – Criticized – Resentful – Defeated – Hopeless – Helpless – Bored – Ignored

THE GASLIGHT TANGO

Abandoned	Ecstatic	Insecure	Satisfied
Adequate	Embarrassed	Intimidated	Shocked
Affectionate	Energetic	Isolated	Shy
Ambivalent	Excited	Jealous	Silly
Anxious	Exhausted	Judgmental	Sluggish
Appreciated	Exhilarated	Lonely	Stunned
Bad	Fearful	Lovable	Threatened
Bored	Frantic	Loving	Thwarted
Comfortable	Frustrated	Miserable	Tired
Confident	Glad	Misunderstood	Touched
Creative	Good	Needy	Troubled
Curious	Grateful	Nervous	Uncertain
Defeated	Guilty	Optimistic	Uneasy
Dejected	Happy	Outraged	Uptight
Dependent	Hostile	Overwhelmed	Violent
Depressed	Inadequate	Paranoid	Vulnerable
Desperate	Incompetent	Pleasant	Wonderful
Determined	Independent	Preoccupied	Worried
Disappointed	Infatuated	Rejected
Discontented	Inferior	Relieved