A Busy Mind Need Not Be a Problem
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MINDFULNESS IN PRACTICE
A Busy Mind Need Not Be a Problem Ajahn Amaro 1
# Amaravati Publications 2020
At the beginning of the day, we set our intention; we direct our attention towards the Triple Gem and express our respect. We reaffirm our commitment to use these qualities as our guiding principles. When recollecting these essential teachings, I often consider that all the information which we as human beings need to be completely liberated is contained in the morning chanting. All that is required is to know, understand, digest, practice, and embody this; through the Triple Gem, the Buddha Dhamma Sangha, liberation will be realized. This is all we need to know. Not much, simply what is here in this small package; but it needs to be fully internalized, fully actualized, made real, brought to life through our practice during the course of the day. Here, in this moment. Recollect these observations: dukkha, anattā, anicca, all conditioned phenomena are unsatisfactory, not-self, and constantly changing. When we look more closely at anicca, change, we see it everywhere, in both the physical world and the mental world. The body is impermanent. This is expressed in the Pali words rūpaṃ aniccaṃ. Rūpa includes all physical form, internal or external, whether it is our own body, a building, a tree, or a planet; rūpa, physical form, is changing. Then, there is vedanā aniccā. Vedanā is the Pali word for sensations, pleasant, painful, neutral sensations. Saññā means “perception”; it is what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch, our sense impressions. These too are changing. Saṅkhārā refers to our mental constructions: thoughts, memories, intentions, plans, imagination, moods, emotions. All are transient, uncertain, unstable, empty. And finally, there is viññāṇa, discriminative consciousness, the fundamental capacity to cognize objects, internal or
Excerpted from The Breakthrough by Ajahn Amaro, Amaravati Publications, 2016. * Ajahn Amaro [email protected] 1
Amaravati Buddhist Monastery, Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire HP1 3BZ, UK
external, and to discern the differences between them. This too is changing. The objects of attention and the consciousness of them are all constantly transforming, moment by moment. These are not just principles to be believed in, but ways of examining our experience, ways of looking at how our mind represents the world. Our experience, moment by moment, is of how our mind constructs the world. Sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch are the faculties through which our mind fabricates an image of the world. Thus, we do not experience the world itself; we experience our mind’s representation of it, built out of body-consciousness, feeling-consciousness, perception, thinking, and concepts. That which is known moment by moment is our mind’s representation of the world. What we experience is a fabricated image of the world, and that image is constantly changing and empty in and of itself. These qualities of anicca, dukkha, anattā—change and uncertainty, unsatisfactoriness, the inherent emptiness
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