Thanissaro Bhikkhu Excerpt from "Between You and Your Eyes"

BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR EYES

"The Buddha’s teachings are primarily about things that are immediately present to our awareness—the feeling of the breath, the movements of the body, thoughts moving in the mind: things immediately present, but things that we tend to miss, things we’re pretty ignorant about. 

When we suffer, we think we know suffering, but we don’t really. When we have a desire, we think we know our desires, but we don’t really.

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Our attention is mainly focused someplace else—on our plans for the future, issues from the past—so that what’s immediately present is simply used as a means to something else. As a result, the important issues in life—the things that are immediately present to our awareness, the things we’re doing right now—we don’t really comprehend. Even something as simple as the breath: The Buddha says that when you breathe in ignorance, the breath is a cause for suffering. Here it is, the basic force of your life, what keeps you alive, and you hardly know it. 

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What does really good breathing feel like? It takes time to stop and look, to put aside your plans of where you want it to take you. Simply look at the process in and of itself. And the Buddha’s guidelines for looking are important to know, too. It’s not simply a matter of being equinamous. 

Equanimity actually comes pretty far down the path. 

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I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people say about meditation, “Well, get the mind to be still and then start looking for the three characteristics.” That’s skipping over a huge area of practice, which is based on the four noble truths. Look for where there is stress. Try to comprehend it.  Comprehending means knowing it so thoroughly that when you see that the things that you used to think were pleasurable really are stressful, you’re willing to develop dispassion toward them. Only when you’re totally dispassionate toward stress do you really comprehend it. 

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And there’s craving, the second noble truth. 

You don’t just sit there and watch craving arise and pass away until the point where you’re okay with it. You have to really let it go. Only when it’s totally abandoned do you really know it. 

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Then there’s the path. The path is something you develop. And the main factor of the path is right concentration. You want to be able to focus on the object of your meditation in a way that induces a sense of pleasure or ease, along with refreshment or rapture. Those are things you try to develop. It’s only when you fully develop them that you know the path..."

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Excerpt from "Between You and Your Eyes"

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Read the full essay here:

http://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/Writings/CrossIndexed/Published/Meditations8/080318BetweenYouAndYourEyes.pdf

6 April 2023