swim upstream

from an unentangled knowing by upasika kee nanayon

"in developing mindfulness as a foundation for probing in to know the truth within yourself, you have to apply a level of effort and persistence appropriate to the task."

"with some things - such as giving up addictions - you can mount a full-scale campaign and come out winning without killing yourself in the process.  but with other things, more subtle and deep, you have to be more perceptive so as to figure out how to overcome them over the long haul, digging up their roots so that they gradually weaken to the point where your mindfulness and discernment can overwhelm them."

"pleasure is more treacherous than pain because it's hard to fathom and easy to fall for."

"intelligent people, even though they see things clearly, always keep an eye out for the enemies lying in wait for them on the deeper, more subtle levels ahead.  they have to keep penetrating further and further in.  they have no sense that this or that level is plenty enough - for how can it be enough?  the defilements are still burning away, so how can you brag?  even though your knowledge may be true, how can you be complacent when your mind has yet to establish a foundation for itself?"

"if we turn within and discern the deceits and conceits of self, a profound feeling of disenchantment and dismay arises, causing us to pity ourselves for our own stupidity, for the amount to which we've deluded ourselves all along, and for how much effort we'll still need to put into the practice."

"to let go of anything, you first have to see its drawbacks.  if you simply tell yourself to let go, let go let go, you can't really let go. . . we haven't yet realized the heat of sensual passions, which is why we still like them so much.  even though every attachment is stressful by its very nature, we see it as good."

"this is because the mind has never grown weary of sensuality, hasn't developed any sense of renunciation, any desire to be free from sensuality.  it still like to lie soaking in sensuality.  if it gains sensual pleasure, it's satisfied.  if it doesn't, it gets angry and resentful."

"the type of dhamma that pokes at our sore points is something that goes against the grain with all of us.  this is because we don't like criticism.  we don't like being reprimanded.  we want nothing but praise and admiration, to the point where we swell up with air.  but people with real mindfulness and discernment don't want any of that.  they want to hear helpful criticism, helpful reprimands.  this is what it means to have discernment and intelligence: you know how to take criticism in an intelligent way."

"whenever we see stress, we see its truth.  when we see the cause of stress, we see its truth.  we both know and see because we've focused on it.  if you don't focus on stress, you won't know it; but as soon as you focus on it, you will.  it's because the mind hasn't focused here that it wanders out oblivious, chasing after its preoccupations."

"to practice the dhamma, then, is to go against the flow, to go upstream against suffering and stress, because suffering and stress are the main problems.  if you don't really contemplate stress, your practice will go nowhere.  stress is where you start, and then you try to trace out its root cause.  you have to use your discernment to track down exactly where stress originates, for stress is a result.  once you see the result, you have to track down the cause.  those who are mindful and discerning are never complacent.  whenever stress arises they're sure to search out its causes so that they can eliminate them.  this sort of investigation can proceed on many levels, from the coarse to the refined, and requires that you seek advice so that you don't stumble.  otherwise, you may think you can figure it all out in your head - which won't work at all!"

"the more you practice and contemplate, the more you become sensitive to this on deeper and deeper levels.  your interest in blatant things outside - good and bad people, good and bad things - gets swept away.  you don't have to concern yourself with them, for you're concerned solely with penetrating yourself within, destroying your pride and conceit."

"those who still latch on to the body, feeling, perceptions, thought-fabrications, and consciousness as self need to contemplate until they see that the body is stressful, feelings are stressful, perceptions are stressful, thought-fabrications are stressful, consciousness is stressful - in short, name is stressful and so is form, or in even plainer terms, the body is stressful and so is the mind.  you have to focus on stress."

"the reason we contemplate the body and mind over and over again is so that we won't feel desire for anything outside, won't get engrossed in anything outside.  the more you contemplate, the more things outside seem pitiful and not worth getting engrossed in at all."

stop and still

from an unentangled knowing by upasika kee nanayon

"you'll see with every mental moment that things disband, disband, disband - really nothing at all.  the important point is that you don't go forming issues out of nothing."

"if you keep watch on bare arising and disbanding like this, you're sure to arrive at insight.  but if you keep watch with labels - "that's the sound of a cow," "that's the bark of a dog" - you won't be watching the bare sensation of sound, the bare sensation of arising and disbanding.  as soon as there's labeling, thought-fabrications come along with it.  your senses of touch, sight, hearing and so forth will continue their bare arising and disbanding, but you won't know it.  instead, you'll label everything - sights, sounds, etc. - and then there will be attachments, feelings of pleasure and displeasure, and you won't know the truth."

"so when you turn to look inward, you shouldn't use concepts and labels to do your looking for you.  if you use concepts and labels to do your looking, there will be nothing but concepts arising, changing, and disbanding.  everything will get all concocted into thoughts - and then how will you be able to watch in utter silence? . . . if you carry all the paraphernalia of the concepts and standards you've gained from your learning to gauge things inside you, you can search to your dying day and yet won't meet with any real truths at all.  this is why you have to hold to only one theme in your practice.  if the mind has lots of themes to concern itself with, it's still just wandering around - wandering around to know this and that, going out of bounds without realizing it and not really wanting to know itself.  this is why those with a lot of learning like to teach others, to show off their level of understanding.  and this is precisely how the desire to stand out keeps the mind obscured."

"we need the discernment that comes with right view and the virtue that comes with self-discipline.  . . discernment is what enables you to know; virtue is what enables you to let go, to relinquish, to destroy your addictions.  virtue isn't just a matter of the five or eight precepts, you know.  it has to deal with the finest details.  whatever your discernment sees as a cause of suffering, you have to stop, you have to let go.  virtue is something that gets very subtle and precise.  letting go, giving up, renouncing, abstaining, cutting away, and destroying: all of these things are an affair of virtue."

"if we concoct very much of this 'me', we can get very angry.  just this fact alone should enable us to observe that as soon as our 'self' gets involved, we suffer immediately."

"if the mind is really stable in its concentration. . . desire won't be able to provoke it.  when concentration is stable, the fires of passion, aversion, and delusion won't be able to burn it.  try to see within yourself how the stability of the mind can withstand these things, disbanding the stress, putting out the flames."

"the practice is a matter of stopping so that the mind can settle down and stand fast. . . if you know the state of the mind when it's centered, immovable, no longer wavering, no longer weak, then the basic level of the mind will be free and empty - empty of the things that would burn it, empty because there's no attachment."

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.