looking inward

from an unentangled knowing by upasika kee nanayon (translated by thanissaro bhikkhu)

"anyone who has to fight to have his/her ideas accepted inevitably loses touch with the qualities of dispassion, self-effacement, unentanglement with others, contentment with little, and seclusion - qualities the buddha set forth as the litmus test for gauging whether or not a proposed course of action, and the person proposing it, were in accordance with the dhamma." -thanissaro bhikkhu

to begin with, know that the body is composed of various physical properties, the major ones being the properties of earth, water, fire, and wind; the minor ones being the aspects that adhere to the major ones: things like color, smell, shape, etc.  these properties are unstable (inconstant), stressful, and unclean.  if you look into them deeply, you will see that there's no substance to them at all.  they are simply impersonal conditions, with nothing worth calling 'me' or 'mine'.  when you can clearly perceive the body in these terms, you will be able to let go of any clinging or attachment to it as an entity, your self, someone else, this or that.

the second step is to deal with mental phenomena (feelings, perceptions, thought-fabrications, and consciousness).  focus on keeping track of the truth that these are characterized by arising, persisting, and then disbanding.  in other words, their nature is to arise and disband, arise and disband, repeatedly.

start out by brushing aside all external concerns and turn to look inside at your own mind until you can know in what ways it's clear or murky, calm or unsettled... until you've trained the mind to stay firmly in a state of normalcy (neutrality).

when you focus on the breath, using the breath as a leash to tie the mind in place so that it doesn't go wandering off, you have to use your endurance.  you have to endure pain...  if there's pleasure, don't get enthralled with it... if there's a lot of pain, you first have to endure it and then relax your attachments.  don't think of the pain as being your pain.  let it be the pain of the body, the pain of nature.

if you can maintain equanimity in the face of pleasure or pain, it can make the mind peaceful - peaceful even though the pain is still pain.  the mind keeps knowing, enduring the pain so as to let it go... this is a really important skill to develop, because it will make craving, defilement, and attachment grow weaker and weaker... as for the pleasure that comes from the practice, it's a cool pleasure that lets go of everything, really free from any sense of me or mine.

why is it that the mind can stay engaged with the defilements all day long and yet go for entire days without knowing how heavy or subtle the breath is at all?

you look, you know, right there at the mind and can tell whether or not it's empty and still.  once you see that it is, then you investigate to see how it's empty, how it's still.  it's not the case that once it's empty, that's the end of the matter; once it's still, that's the end of the matter.  that's not the case at all.  you have to keep watch of things, you have to investigate at all times.  only then will you see the changing- the arising and disbanding- occurring in that emptiness, that stillness, that state of normalcy.

you were born to study pain and the causes of pain, and to follow the practice that frees you from pain. . . if we contemplate it till we know all its details, we can then make it our sport: seeing that the pain is the pain of natural conditions and not our pain.  this is something we have to research so as to get to the details: that it's not our pain, it's the pain of the aggregates [form, feeling, perception, thought-fabrications, and consciousness].  knowing in this way means that we can separate out the properties - the properties of matter and those of the mind- to see how they interact with one another, how they change.  it's something really fascinating... watching pain is a way of building up lots of mindfulness and discernment.