Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Continue with Part 01
The important stages of meditation is when you discover within the mind a knowing core that does not die at the death of the body. If you can reach this point in your meditation, then death poses no problem at all.
Excerpts of talk given by Ven. Thanissaro at a conference on AIDS, HIV and other immuno-deficiency disorders - Part II
As the mind settles more and more solidly into the present, it gains strength. You feel as if all the scattered fragments of your attention worrying about this, remembering that, anticipating, whatever come gathering together and the mind takes on a sense of wholeness and unification. This gives the mind a sense of power. As you let this sense of wholeness develop, you find that it becomes more and more solid in all your activities, regardless of whether you’re formally meditating or not, and this is what leads to the third step.
As you become more and more single-minded in protecting this sense of wholeness, you become more and more sensitive, and gain more and more insight into the things that can knock it off balance. On the first level, you notice that if you do anything hurtful to yourself or others, that destroys it.
Then you start noticing how the simple occurrence in the mind of such things as greed, lust, anger, delusion and fear can also knock it off balance. You begin to discern ways to reduce the power that these things have over the mind, until you can reach a level of awareness that is untouched by these things or by anything at all and you can be free from them.
It’s these higher stages in meditation that can be the most beneficial. If you practise meditation simply as a form of relaxation, that’s okay for dealing with the element of your disease that comes from stress, but there’s a lot more going on in AIDS, physically and mentally, than simply stress, and if you limit yourself to relaxation or visualization, you’re not getting the full benefits that meditation has to offer.
Now we come to the topic of what meditation can do for you as you face serious illness and death.
When one focus on how to use meditation to face these things and transcend them. First, pain. When it happens, you first have to accept that it’s there. This in itself is a major step, since most people, when they encounter pain, try to deny it its right to exist. They think they can avoid it by pushing it away, but that’s like trying to avoid paying taxes by throwing away your tax return: You may get away with it for a little while, but then the authorities are bound to catch on, and you’ll be worse off than you were before. So the way to transcend pain is first to understand it, to get acquainted with it, and this means enduring it. However, meditation can offer a way of detaching yourself from the pain while you are living with it, so even though it’s there, you don’t have to suffer from it.
First, if you master the technique of focusing on the breath and adjusting it so that it’s comfortable, you find that you can choose where to focus your awareness in the body. If you want, you can focus it on the pain, but in the earlier stages its best to focus on the parts of the body that are comfortable. Let the pain have the other part. You’re not going to drive it out, but at the same time you don’t have to move in with it. Simply regard it as a fact of nature, an event that is happening, but not necessarily happening to you.
Another technique is to breathe through the pain. If you can become sensitive to the breath sensations that course through the body each time you breathe, you will notice that you tend to build a tense shell around the pain, where the energy in the body doesn’t flow freely. This, although it’s a kind of avoidance technique, actually increases the pain. So think of the breath flowing right through the pain as you breathe in and out, to dissolve away this shell of tension.
As your powers of concentration become stronger and more settled, you can begin to analyse the pain. The first step is to divide it into its physical and mental components. Distinguish between the actual physical pain, and the mental pain that comes along with it: The sense of being persecuted justly or unjustly the fear that the pain may grow stronger or signal the end, whatever.
Then remind yourself that you don’t have to side with those thoughts. If the mind is going to think them, you don’t have to fall in with them. Then, when you stop feeding them, you’ll find that after a while they’ll begin to go away, just like a crazy person coming to talk with you. If you talk with the crazy person, after a while you’ll go crazy too. If however, you let the crazy person chatter away, but don’t join in the conversation, after a while the crazy person will leave you alone. It’s the same with all the garbage thoughts in your mind.
As you strip away all the mental paraphernalia surrounding your pain including the idea that the pain is yours or is happening to you as you would find that you finally come down to the label that simply says, This is a pain and it’s right there. When you can get past this, that’s when your meditation undergoes a breakthrough. One way is to simply notice that this label will arise and then pass away. When it comes, it increases the pain.
When it goes, the pain subsides. Then try to see that the body, the pain and your awareness are all three separate things like three pieces of string that have been tied into a knot, but which you now untie. When you can do this, you find that there is no pain that you cannot endure.
Another area where meditation can help you is to live with the simple fact of your body being ill. For some people, accepting this fact is one of the hardest parts of illness. But once you have developed a solid center in your mind, you can base your happiness there, and begin to view illness with a lot more equanimity. We have to remember that illness is not cheating us out of anything. It’s simply a part of life.
As I said earlier, illness is normal; health is miracle. The idea of all the complex systems of the body functioning properly is so improbable that we shouldn’t be surprised when they start breaking down.
Many people complain that the hardest part of living with a disease like AIDS or cancer is the feeling that they have lost control over their bodies, but once you gain more control over your mind, you begin to see that the control you thought you had over your body was illusory in the first place.
The body has never entered into an agreement with you that it would do as you liked. You simply moved in, forced it to eat, walk, talk, etc., and then thought you were in charge. But even then it kept on doing as it liked getting hungry, defecating, falling down, getting injured, getting sick, growing old. When you reflect on the people who think they have the most control over their bodies.
So an important function of meditation in giving you a solid center that provides you a vantage point from which to view life in its true colours is that it keeps you from feeling threatened or surprised when the body begins to reassert its independence. Even if the brain starts to malfunction, the people who have developed mindfulness through meditation can be aware of the fact, and let go of that part of their bodies too.
As I said earlier, one of the important stages of meditation is when you discover within the mind a knowing core that does not die at the death of the body. If you can reach this point in your meditation, then death poses no problem at all. Even if you haven’t reached that point, you can prepare yourself for death in such a way that you can die skilfully, and not in the messy way that most people die.
If you haven’t been practising meditation, this sort of experience can be overwhelming, and the mind will latch on to whatever offers itself and then will get carried away in that direction. If, though, you have practised meditation, becoming skilful at letting go of your thoughts, or knowing which thoughts to hang onto and which ones to let pass, you’ll be able to handle the situation, refusing to fall in line with any mental states that aren’t of the highest quality. If your concentration is firm, you can make this the ultimate test of the skill you have been developing. If there’s pain, you can see which will disappear first: the pain or the core of your awareness. You can rest assured that no matter what, the pain will go first, for that core of awareness cannot die.
What all this boils down to is that, as long as you are able to survive, meditation will improve the quality of your life, so that you can view pain and illness with equanimity and learn from them.
When the time comes to go, when the doctors have to throw up their hands in helplessness, the skill you have been developing in your meditation is one thing that won’t abandon you. It will enable you to handle your death with finesse. Even though we don’t like to think about it, death is going to come no matter what, so we should learn how to stare it down. Remember that a death well handled is one of the surest signs of a life well lived.
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