Realization Is Here and Now
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MINDFULNESS IN PRACTICE
Realization Is Here and Now Ajahn Amaro 1 Accepted: 14 October 2020 # Amaravati Publications 2020
When we are living together on a retreat, gathered as a human community for a period of time, life is extraordinarily simple. The bell wakes us up in the morning, we gather in the shrine room, chant, sit, meet for breakfast, do the washing-up, go about our chores, sit, walk, eat, do not have to talk to anybody, do not have to make any decisions. Everything is provided for us— shelter, food, good company, safe situation, and even gloriously beautiful weather. This is about as simple as human life can get—benign, peaceful, and repetitive. Just about as uncomplicated as life can be. And we arrange it this way to create the most supportive conditions for us to be able to see clearly, for us to be able to understand how the mind and how the world work. What is this strange condition called human life? What is the mind, the body, the universe? How does it work? The simpler the living situation, the simpler our routine; the simpler our mode of being, the easier it is to discern those patterns of relationship. But our minds love complication, don't they? Out of its habits, the mind delights in creating complication and conceptual proliferation. This is called papañca in Pali. The thinking mind loves to create complication: calculating and elaborating, running off in this direction and that, creating commentaries and opinions and judgements. Papañca is one of the diseases of the mind. One of the epithets of the Buddha is nippapañca—one who is free from complication, free from the mind’s habitual elaborations. Papañca is considered a disease because in each moment life is extremely simple. There is just this—the experience of the body, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, consciousness, coming and going, changing; sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, thought and mood coming and going; organic patterns Excerpted from The Breakthrough by Ajahn Amaro, Amaravati Publications, 2016. * Ajahn Amaro [email protected] 1
Amaravati Buddhist Monastery, Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire HP1 3BZ, UK
of change and patterns of nature taking shape and dissolving. That is all. But the mind loves to create complications. The thinking mind takes hold of a perception, and out of memory and imagination, desire and fear, restlessness and frustration, it creates commentaries and sub-commentaries and sub-subcommentaries, strings of association. The sound of a bird reminds us of a place where we used to live. It reminds us of who we used to live with. It reminds us of who we went on holiday with, what happened on that holiday, the excitements, and the arguments, and within seconds, we are off reliving events that happened 10 years ago, or events that did not actually happen at all. We imagine what could have happened on that wonderful holiday if only we had got it right, and we had not said some stupid thing and said some wonderful thing instead. Then, if this person had not been this way, and I had not been that way, and
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