The Teaching of Ajahn Suchart.
29 April 2023
Question: When we are in deep meditation, is the mind’s khandha also not moving?
Than Ajahn: Yeah. It’s reduced to almost zero. Your thought (sankhāra) stops. And then your vedanā, saññā, viññāṇa also stop working.
Student: When an unenlightened person comes into contact with feeling, and then he or she forms a good or bad memory of that experience, hence it’s all a delusion that he or she is living in because he or she is not seeing thing as it is.
Than Ajahn: Well, it is real but it's not real. It's there, it’s happening, but what you see is an illusion because of the anicca or the temporary nature of it. If you don't have this understanding, you will think that this is something real and then you get involved with it. You become the actor. The truth is there's no actor. There's just the knower.
Student: It’s similar to the experience I had when I was younger. I used to do painting with my friend. One day, our teacher told us to paint a red chili, but my friend painted a greed chili instead. Later on, we found out that he was colour-blind, so to him, what he painted was a red chili.
Than Ajahn: Because to him, the red is green. So how you see things is a matter of perception.
With a deluded mind, you see the body as a human being or an animal, as an ego possessing the body.
But if you contemplate on the truth, the Buddha said that there's no self in the body. So you are being possessed by the deluded mind to think that there is a self in the body. So you want to reverse this perception, to turn it back to the truth—that there's no self in anything.
No self in the body. No self in thinking. No self in feeling. Nobody sees. Nobody thinks. But there is feeling; there is thinking; there is perceiving; there is knowing. But no ‘one’ to know. No ‘one’ to think.
It’s just a process.
Like the sun, the wind and the rain. Rain falls, but nobody makes it falls right? Rain falls by itself.
The wind blows by itself. The thinking thinks by itself. The perceiving perceives by itself. But with the deluded mind, it perceives that there is somebody who is thinking, somebody who is feeling. ‘I am thinking. I am feeling.’
‘I am mad.’ But there is no ‘I’ that is mad. There is just madness. There is anger, but there is no ‘someone’ who is mad. It’s just a condition that arises caused by some other condition. For example, when you see something you don’t like, anger arises automatically.
This is mental science. But people don’t understand it. Even the PhDs don’t understand this because they don't study this type of science. Nobody teaches them. And unfortunately, religion has also been hijacked by the ignorant people. People turn religion into rituals, or something mystical, something that could not be understood. When in fact, the truth is just like science. It just needs someone who can teach this truth to people to make them understand how it works.
Student: Thank you Than Ajahn.
“Dhamma in English, Nov 15, 2022.”
By Ajahn Suchart Abhijāto
YouTube: Dhamma in English.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi_BnRZmNgECsJGS31F495g
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