Paccuppanna The Present Moment

Paccuppanna
The Present Moment

Ajahn Sundara
Dhamma Reflections by

Ajahn Sundara

Paccupana-COVER.indd 1 02/06/2017 09:32

Paccuppanna
The Present Moment

DHAMMA REFLECTIONS BY

Ajahn Sundara
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

With gratitude to all those who praticipated in the publication

of this book, especially to Adam Long and Nicholas Halliday
who generously offered their time, kind support and skills in
bringing it to completion.
‘They do not repent the past, nor do they brood over the future.
They live in the present. Therefore they are radiant.’

Samyutta Nikaya
 TIMELESS

Awareness has a mirror-like quality. We can tap into it right

now, become aware of the mind and body as they are in
this moment. Perhaps awareness is reflecting the feeling
of sleepiness or of not knowing, the feeling of cold or heat,
heaviness or lightness. Reflective consciousness can see
things, even the things that are closest to us. It reflects feelings
of aversion, anger, kindness, pleasant feelings, unpleasant
feelings – all kinds of things. This quality of seeing, of knowing
this reflective mind, is neutral. There is no sense of judging or
criticising; awareness merely reflects the judging or the critical
mind. That is what the Buddha is talking about when he says
that the Dhamma is ‘apparent here and now’; not tomorrow or
yesterday, but here and now in the present moment. And the
Dhamma is timeless – it is not dependent on time.

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 STOPPING THE MIND

Occasionally, we wonder if we are on the right track. Should

we change religions, change paths, change teachers? At times
like this, when our minds are in the grip of confusion, the path
is still here right in front of us, immediately apparent here and
now, timeless.
Ajahn Chah gave a teaching which is transcendent – the
rational mind cannot fathom this teaching:
‘Practice is not moving forward, but there is forward movement.
At the same time, it is not moving back, but there is backward
movement. And finally, practice is not stopping and being still,
but there is stopping and being still. So there is moving forward
and backward as well as being still, but you can’t say that it is
any one of the three. Then practice eventually comes to a point
where there is neither forward nor backward movement, nor
any being still. Where is that?’

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 MEETING REALITY

A teacher in the Thai Forest tradition once told some of his

disciples that when we meet someone, we needn’t be overly
romantic. To put it bluntly, we are just meeting a big bag of
kilesas. Once we see this reality as it is, we don’t have unrealistic
expectations. Often we suffer when we find people’s minds are
not the way we perhaps thought they were. We thought they
were in charge. We thought they ought to be loving and caring.
But it is good to remember that what we actually encounter is
mostly a bunch of kilesas. This helps because attachment is a
kilesa, even attachment to goodness and kindness. Attachment
skews your perception. If you attach to goodness and kindness,
or to being a Buddhist, somebody who doesn’t fit your view is
suddenly ‘not right’. Often people say (or think), ‘How can you
be angry and be a Buddhist? If you were a true Buddhist, you

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 would be really patient with me. If you were a true Buddhist
you would be able to control your mind.’

No. ‘True Buddhists’ are people who can see when they don’t
control their minds. They see their mind as they are. They
aren’t caught up in an idea of how the mind should be. As true
Buddhists we have the wisdom to know what makes us turn
into hellish beings with hellish lives, and the wisdom to know
how to bring those lives into a place of goodness, kindness, love
and peace, the qualities that make a liveable world. Then the
practice and life become a single unit. We may be practising
sitting in full lotus or on a chair, or lying down, walking or
running, but the mind (citta) is with us all the time. And the
mind is not just the brain or the intellect. It is the reality that
we experience in each moment. This experience includes
feelings, mental constructs, memories, desires, sensations –
whatever experience is present here and now, this is the mind.

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The practice is so beautifully simple. All the techniques,
methods and teachings are designed simply to bring us back
to the present moment, here and now, to bring us back to
seeing clearly. All the techniques and methods help to give
us a good pair of spectacles. We wear them so we don’t have
blurry eyesight. When we look at the world through lenses of
greed, hatred or delusion, we look at a very blurry world. And
yet as meditators, we can become attached to clarity, to purity,
to wanting a perfect view. But it may be a long time before we
achieve that perfect view. Meanwhile our vision is not clear yet
and that’s just the way it is.

The Buddha encourages us to develop Right Effort, Right

Concentration and Right Mindfulness as balancing factors
helping us bit by bit to achieve clear vision. Balance is a
skill we develop, we don’t achieve it straightaway. We’re
not working with an inanimate object. We are working with

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 energy, our big energy body that doesn’t always tell us in
advance how it is going to respond to the practice. So we have
to become skilled in receiving this energy without freaking out,
without misinterpreting it or being confused by the energetic
movement of the mind and body. According to the Buddha’s
teaching, integration of the world begins with sila (ethics);
that is the foundation. Ethics requires effort, it calls for energy.
It can be more difficult than meditation and attaining Samadhi.
Ethics is the first step, and the hardest one for most people.

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 WHEN MIND SEES MIND

The consumer society creates a dynamic in which we become

more and more frustrated as we pursue things we think will
make us happy one day. Eventually there comes a point when
we start to notice that all the tantalizing things in the world
do not bring the happiness that a human being seeks. At some
point, we experience nibbida, which means ‘disenchantment’.
Things that once seemed so important become meaningless;
they make no sense, they seem to have no purpose. We
realize that we have just been piling up more anger, stupidity,
selfishness, fear, worry and so on, and that this is not what
we were looking for. At some point we begin to think, ‘Ah,
maybe I need something that is going to help my mind stop
being reborn into the misery of clinging to mind-states, to stop
continually piling up delusion, negativity and aversion.’

And finally we bump into the Buddha’s teaching.

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 Awakened beings don’t usually do things that make them
miserable. Their lives may still have some misery, but they
don’t pick it up. They don’t identify with it; they don’t make
it their own. They stop and look at it; they feel, experiencing
their life as it is right now, and they leave it there.

Luang Por Dun1 described the Four Noble Truths in this way:
when the mind goes out, it is caught in desire. This is the cause
of suffering. The fruit of the mind that goes out is suffering.
When mind sees mind, this is the path. The result of mind
seeing mind is nirodha, the cessation of suffering.
We cannot train the mind just by constantly accumulating
knowledge about Buddhism. We have to start with our life as it is,
right here, right now, in this moment. We may still be infatuated
with the desire to be constantly satisfied. Detachment may not
make sense yet. While in the grip of desire, we may see that life
is varied and exciting, and this can make us temporarily happy

1. Luang Por Dun was one of Luang Por Mun’s disciples and a highly respected
12 Forest monk.
or miserable. But we are blind to other aspects of life, such as the
joy of peace, of clarity, of a mind that is full of understanding and
wisdom, a mind that is kind, calm and compassionate. We may
occasionally experience that perspective, but is it our refuge
yet? Has it taken root? Or is it just passing moments, passing
experiences? Perhaps the mind and body haven’t yet been
transformed by these qualities. Have we seen clearly that anger
is totally useless, that it harms everybody, including ourselves?

In the Fire Sermon the Buddha explains that everything is ‘on

fire’: the mind is on fire, the eyes are on fire, the six senses are
on fire. He used that simile to teach a group of ascetics who were
fire worshippers. He explained to them that through seeing
Dhamma, disenchantment arises and the mind cools down
and it can eventually free itself from this fire. This ‘burning’ is
the mind caught up in greed, hatred and delusion. If you have
enough stress, anguish, disappointment or negativity in your

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 life, you will know how they burn. Clinging makes us really hot,
heated up with misery. The Buddha points us toward the peace
of a cool mind.

The Fire Sermon takes us through the whole package of

the human being on fire: burning through the six sense-
consciousnesses, the six sense-doors (eye, ear, nose, tongue,
body, mind) and their objects. This is the focus of the path of
practice. We look at the mind, at our body, at our humanity,
our human qualities, our human life; we investigate them,
we search within ourselves: ‘What is it that causes me to feel
the way I feel right now?’ We don’t have to think about it.
Meditation takes us straight to the immediacy of the reality
of now, the reality of looking at the mind and body without
extra imagery. We don’t have to read a book to learn about this,
we simply look at our mind and body. Ajahn Chah often told
his disciples to read the book within themselves. The book is

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our mind with all its stories, all its structures, constructions,
memories, anticipations, hopes and so on. That is our inner
book, the book we learn to read in meditation practice.
I find Luang Por Dun’s teaching of the third noble truth very
helpful: ‘The mind seeing the mind is the Path.’2 I don’t have
to believe it blindly; I can put it to the test, put it into practice,
right here and now, by starting with mindfulness. Mindfulness
is what carries us along the path of practice. It brings us straight
back to the present moment where there is the possibility
of being awake and aware and knowing what’s what. It is

2. A senior monk of the meditation tradition came to pay his respects to Luang
Por Dun on the first day of the Rains Retreat in 1956. After giving him instruction
and a number of teachings on profound matters, Luang Por Dun summarized the
four noble truths as follows:
The mind sent outside is the origination of suffering.
The result of the mind sent outside is suffering.
The mind seeing the mind is the path.
The result of the mind seeing the mind is the cessation of suffering.

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 important that we see directly, not just intellectually. As long as
the mind still identifies seeing with intellectual understanding
and hasn’t come to the realization of Dhamma at the deeper
level, it is still a bit lost. The intellectual mind is still there
amid waves of doubt and anxiety, constantly moving around
trying to defend one thing and reject another. The Dhamma
mind is confident and trusting. It recognizes the limitation of
taking refuge in the thinking mind. The thinking mind is not a
waste of time, it’s just limited. The thinking mind still has the
tendency to think it knows, and so it keeps falling into views.
Thinking ‘I know’ is conceit. Conceit is attaching to an idea of
‘who I am.’ You might think, ‘I am a hopeless case. I can’t be a
Buddhist. It’s too hard for me.’ That’s a form of conceit. Whether
we think we’re superior, inferior or equal – that’s still conceit,
that’s still ‘self’, ‘me’.

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When we start relating without being so caught up in the
attachment to ‘me’ and ‘mine’ – my mind, my position, my
view – being human is really easy, and relating as human
beings is not so difficult. We no longer see and experience
anyone as ‘out there’. We feel each other as human bodies,
feeling bodies. When we recognize this, we begin to participate
in life as something bigger than just ‘me’ and ‘my’. That
brings a lot of joy. We don’t have to keep on trying to control
everything through fear and worry. We are able to witness the
blessing of trust.

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 FIVE PRECEPTS

The Buddha teaches us that when we keep the Five Precepts

– when we refrain from harming, from stealing, from sexual
misconduct, from using unkind speech, lying, backbiting
and so on, when we refrain from taking drugs, intoxicants or
substances that cloud our mind – we are actually practising
generosity. The Buddha called the Precepts the five gifts:

Now, there are these five gifts, five great gifts – original,
long-standing, traditional, ancient, unadulterated,
unadulterated from the beginning – that are not open to
suspicion, will never be open to suspicion, and are unfaulted
by knowledgeable contemplatives and priests. Which five?

There is the case where a disciple of the noble ones,

abandoning the taking of life, abstains from taking life. In
doing so, he gives

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 freedom from danger, freedom from animosity, freedom
from oppression to limitless numbers of beings.

In giving freedom from danger, freedom from animosity,

freedom from oppression to limitless numbers of beings,
he gains a share in limitless freedom from danger, freedom
from animosity, and freedom from oppression.

This is the first gift, the first great gift – original,

long-standing, traditional, ancient, unadulterated,
unadulterated from the beginning – that is not open to
suspicion, will never be open to suspicion, and is unfaulted
by knowledgeable contemplatives and priests.

Anguttara Nikaya 8.39

The Buddha tells us that in observing the first precept, we

are giving numberless beings freedom from fear, enmity
and oppression, and in return we partake of that freedom

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 ourselves. This is just to give a sense of how interconnected
we all are and how vast is our influence in this world. He then
elaborates on each of the other four precepts and shows that
in observing them we are giving faultless gifts to a limitless
number of beings.

No matter how disenchanted we feel with the world, this

disenchantment can be turned into wise understanding
of the limitations of our human life. When we have wise
understanding, it can have a profound effect on other human
beings and bring blessings and happiness into our lives and
the lives of others. Simply by being awake and transforming
the heart of Dhamma – letting go of greed, hatred, stupidity
and delusion, conceit and the rest of it – we help other beings
and ourselves.

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 DRINKING FRESH WATER

Sometimes carrying the baggage of a spiritual tradition can

take us away from the present moment. Clinging to Buddhist
perception is not the path. This is why we sometimes don’t feel
the joy of practice: because we are still holding onto ideas of
how things should be, instead of drinking at the source and
quenching our thirst for enlightenment, for freedom. Drinking
at the source means seeing directly. That is the beauty of this
path: it is completely available and close to us, always here.

Mindfulness is a doorway to awareness of the present

moment, so that even the hindrances (craving, ill-will, sloth
and torpor, restlessness and worry, doubt) can be seen for
just what they are – changing, unsatisfactory and not-self.
So when the heart and mind are flat, depressed, miserable,
undisciplined, resistant, rebellious, childish, petty, silly – that

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 is the time for practice, and then you will find that a moment
of mindfulness will provide the energy you need. You might
not feel it straightaway, but trust that opening. Mindfulness
brings us the perception of change, which in turn gives us
the trust, confidence and faith to keep going, to not be fooled
by the appearance of things. Confidence brings stability of
mind, concentration.

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 ONE MINDFUL MOMENT

There’s no need to read tons of books or remember all the

teachings we have learned over the years. Just one mindful
moment in the body, breathing in and breathing out, is enough
to bring us back to the Dhamma, back to the Buddha, back to
reality. I’m not saying it’s easy. Much of our practice consists of
not getting it right. The path of awakening is like that – being
able to know that our mistakes and failures are part and parcel
of practice. They are the material we work with for Dhamma
realization. In Dhamma practice, our mistakes and failings are
the food digested to nourish the heart.

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 THE PHYSICIAN

The Buddha is often called a physician of the mind. If we weren’t

sick, we wouldn’t need a physician. The Buddha is awareness.
Taking refuge in the Buddha does not clear all our problems,
but it brings us to a place where we can start doing the work.
Awareness brings clear vision of what is limiting us, burdening
our heart, making our life miserable. We don’t have to annihilate
ourselves, but just see ourselves as we are. Then we can begin to
relax and relate to ourselves with ease, humour and humility.

The deficiencies of our mind and body, the weak spots, are the
materials needed for transformation. We don’t seek problems,
but when they arise we don’t have to see them as something
in the way. We can go to meet each experience with the
faculties of the mind: faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration

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and wisdom. We begin to heal and experience the joy of
letting go, of not clinging, grasping, or complicating things.
Practice is particularly needed at times when we don’t feel
like it, when everything is going wrong, when our lives are
falling apart, our families are driving us mad, our bosses and
co-workers are making us crazy, when the mind is just about
ready to give up. Those are the very situations in which the
practice is most useful. At those times the physician and the
remedy are truly essential. Bring in the physician and the
remedies at those moments. Don’t forget them – just find some
simple Dhamma remedies, all natural, complete naturopathic
treatment with no side effects, a sure way for long-term health.

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 MARA

Mara is a trickster. Mara will try to fool us again and again.

If there is no awareness and wisdom, it is extraordinary how
Mara can trick us into believing things that have no connection
with reality. Sometimes people believe Mara so much they end
up destroying themselves, because Mara is the great destroyer.
Mara doesn’t want us to be enlightened or at peace. Mara
destroys peace, destroys our confidence. Mara is not an entity
out there, but the delusion of our own minds. Mara is our
inability to see things the way they are. The path of practice
works through challenging, inquiring, investigating, learning
to see the manifestations of ignorance clearly. By seeing clearly,
we free our heart from continuing to relate to ourselves in the
mode of delusion.

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 ‘AWAKENISM’

The focus of our practice is on allowing the mind to calm down.

We don’t need to worry about how many insights we will have
or how many problems we will solve. We are learning how to
stabilize the mind, and stabilizing the mind has nothing to
do with wiping out the mind. It is an exercise where we keep
reminding ourselves to be present. As we do that, we notice
how many times the mind runs away somewhere else. We learn
to be with the mind. ‘Buddhism’ is really more like ‘Mindism’.
The Buddha was simply awake, so you could call it ‘Awakenism’.
When we think of it like that, the mind becomes really light.
There are no memories attached to the word ‘awakenism’. How
many websites on ‘Buddhism’ have we seen over the last twenty
years? Our minds are bursting at the seams with knowledge
about ‘Buddhism’, right?

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 I like simple things. ‘Buddh’ means ‘awake’, so we can start
with that. We don’t have to go into a whole commentary about
Paticcasamuppada. Sometimes we accidentally counteract
the process of awakening by filling up our mind with more
thoughts. We can be very attached to thought. Particularly in
this culture, we tend to believe that everything can be solved
through thinking. We can become completely besotted with
thought and strongly loyal to the thinking mind. But in Thailand,
if you start thinking too much, people say you’re a bit mad.

We don’t try to wipe the mind clean; we just allow it to settle.

When the water in a lake is still, you can see to the bottom.
Nobody can tell us what we will see at the bottom of the lake
of our mind. There may be old cans of beer, rotting bicycles
or bodies of cars and dead animals. We shouldn’t imagine
that when we calm the mind we’re not going to see all the
rotten memories, miserable thoughts and so on. Calming and

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stabilizing the mind facilitates seeing, and seeing can lead to
understanding – not through thinking, but by allowing the
wisdom factor to appear. Insight doesn’t necessarily have to
do with thinking. We might suddenly drop the thought and
realize that understanding grows. For a minute we can drop
the thoughts that have been clogging up the brain and jump
into the void. Actually, it is not a ‘void’. It is a jump out of our
security zone. And it is not a big jump, it is just a freedom jump,
a loving jump.

The mind that is not attached has enormous potential. It is

vast and powerful. We don’t always trust it because it can be
difficult and uncomfortable to walk the way of ‘not knowing’.
Ajahn Sumedho was very strong in this respect. He taught me
and many other people to develop a practice of not knowing,
training the mind to be at peace with not knowing. When we
see the mind following its ordinary, habitual ways – ‘don’t

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 know.’ ‘Don’t know’ is very good for cutting through doubt, and
doubt is one of the Five Hindrances. Not sure whether to do
this or that, not sure whether or not Buddhism is good for me,
whether I should go with this person or that person, whether I
should sit on a chair or cushion – doubt can take on any form.
It can be existential: do I exist or not? Am I really as I appear?
Don’t know.

Doubt is a mechanism in the brain, but doubt is not ‘you’. When

you stop following doubts, you might discover that you have
a way of doing things which doesn’t need doubt. Questioning
and investigating are not the same as doubt. Questioning is
asking, ‘Is that true?’ There is a way of questioning that brings
wisdom into the mind. When we question without expecting
an answer, it may be that questioning leads us to ‘don’t know.’

When the mind is constantly trying to solve problems that

it can’t solve properly, we can find ourselves in a very small

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world, a world that is tight, predictable. It is very important to
be with the open mind, the ‘don’t-know’ mind. When we say
‘don’t know’, nothing has changed externally, but internally
we have suddenly stopped sticking to the idea that we should
know, that we must know – and we’ve also stopped our loyalty
to the opposite idea, the despair of worrying that we will
never know, that we are not capable of knowing, that we need
to find somebody else to know for us. And if we search for
somebody else, unfortunately we don’t always find the wisest
person. Sometimes we are lucky, but we don’t always meet
a good adviser.

So we sit quietly on our cushions and just notice. We sit with

the breath, with the body, with the sound of silence. These
little devices, these skilful means, these objects of meditation
are not a pathway to immediate enlightenment. They just calm
the waves in the mind. For some people, having an object of

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 meditation doesn’t always work. Some people feel happier
when they just let their mind be spacious. If that works for
you, use that comfortable spaciousness as an object, as a way of
reminding you to be present.

When you meditate, you don’t have to be anywhere special.

You can just sit. Feel the body sitting and gently bring your
attention to your object. This is a discipline. As soon as we
try to discipline our mind, to focus it on just one thing, it will
start buzzing. It may start remembering other ‘skilful means’
that you’ve used in the past and try to convince you that they
are better than your present object of meditation. Then you
might start jumping around from object to object until you
gently direct your mind to return to the original object. If it
is a well-trained mind, it will follow your orders. This is what
we call a ‘disciplined’ or ‘trained mind’, which does what you
want. If it is not trained yet, if it is restless or agitated, start

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training it gently but firmly, like a child. Bring it back to your
object of meditation.

When the mind is still, you may notice that the rest of your life
is not particularly still. ‘The mind that is still’ is just another
way of saying ‘the mind that is present.’ You may be present
with laziness, carelessness, wilfulness, confusion. Don’t worry
about results. Meditating with a goal in mind creates a duality:
there is ‘me’ and there is ‘the goal’. Work on letting go of this
idea of a goal, but do it without expectations. Our goal-oriented
mind doesn’t stop just because we say ‘don’t expect anything’,
but at least we begin to see its expectations. We begin to see
the contents of all those unskilful kilesas, miserable, afflictive,
harmful mental states. Kilesas have many names, and once we
can put a name on them we can recognize them much more
easily, and then we can catch them and avoid acting on them.
We can actually see that we have the power and resources and

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 means to restrain ourselves from doing something unskilful. It
is good to be able to recognize these things.

We think we can’t stop re-creating bad habits. But we can stop.

That is the joy of our practice – we begin to see the possibility
of not acting or speaking in a way that keeps us stuck in
the same old ruts. A mind that is caught in its own ruts is
depressed. We are meant to be free. It is really important to
have this perspective and to find joy. Energy in the mind is vital
for experiencing joy. Most people search for joy through such
things as drinking coffee, shopping, going to movies, watching
television or listening to music. The Buddha’s way is to have
a mind that is not dependent on these things, though it may
still enjoy television, shopping or whatever. Our mind, has a
beautiful potential for connecting with the joy of the heart on
the way to peace and liberation. This is vital.

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No goal. No expectation. We are not going anywhere. The
title of Ayya Khema’s book, Being Nobody, Going Nowhere, is a
skilful means in words. The mind is always going somewhere
and trying to be somebody. These words are a good antidote.
How many times do we catch ourselves going somewhere?
Somebody says something we think is wrong and we run
to correct them. I don’t mean ‘run’ as for catching a bus. I’m
talking about running with our critical mind, running with our
angry mind, running with our greedy mind. We run. Anger in
particular not only gets you running, it gets you up to Olympic
standard. It feels like a fire that is unstoppable. It took me a long
time and many experiences to realize that anger is redundant.
I’m not saying that I never have anger, but I have no doubt now
that anger solves nothing. It hurts oneself and others. There is
no wisdom in it.
Sometimes people tell me, ‘I have to express my anger. If I am
not angry, I am not alive.’ I have no doubt that we feel very

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 alive when we are banging our fists, slamming the door or
kicking someone. Our depression suddenly goes away for a few
minutes. But don’t trust that. It will return, and it will just keep
depositing us back in the same rut. We need to be reminded
of this many times. It is easy to fall into habits which, like a
mental law of gravity, pull us down into well-worn furrows in
the mind. That is why in some teachings you will come across
references to ‘higher mind’ and ‘lower mind’. Developing the
higher mind means leaving behind the mind of old habits
created and conditioned through anger, greed and delusion. We
let that mind go. The ‘higher mind’ is the mind of wisdom and
compassion, an unselfish mind that is able to bring happiness
into this world and benefit other people. It is a beautiful mind.
But we mustn’t be too caught up in duality, thinking we must
destroy one mind to develop another. We simply let go of the
lower mind, of all the activities bound up with attachment and
destructive emotions, and allow the higher mind to manifest.

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 WORRY

When worry leaves us, where does it go? Have you found a
place where your worry goes? Or is what disappears really the
illusion of worry? Worry is like a bubble. If we believe in it,
it can be frightening. We can believe something huge is about
to fall on us. But when we realise it’s really just a bubble, it
suddenly bursts and disappears. The ignorant mind will always
find a reason to continue worrying. We think we have to worry
about this and that. We fear that if we don’t worry, life will stop.
Well, if we stop worrying, for sure the miseries of life are likely
to stop, but maybe something else will arrive. We don’t know
yet, but we can always take the risk of finding out by stopping
the mind from worrying or fearing and seeing what happens.
But don’t stop the worry by repressing it. The way to stop it
is by becoming aware, conscious, mindful. Awareness ends the
illusions of worry. They might not stop straightaway. We need

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 to be patient and determined to be able to sustain our attention
and determination, but when we do, the illusory quality of what
we think, feel or hear starts getting lighter. That is because we
have stopped believing in what we experience, so the power of
illusory thought decreases.

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 KEEPING ON

Even when the practice becomes boring or uninteresting, we

still stay with it. The state of boredom may be a crucial moment,
as it could mean we are on the edge of letting go. Mara will do
anything to make us give up. When you’re just about to give up,
stay with the practice mindfully; persevere and read the mind
correctly. ‘Reading the mind correctly’ is an expression used
often in the Forest Tradition. It sounds simple, but we mostly
read our minds incorrectly. We see permanence when there is
impermanence. We see happiness when there is misery. We see
things as belonging to us when they do not – ‘my’ property,
‘my’ body, ‘my’ mind. We often read the mind incorrectly and
so think we are incapable of achievement, but if we really look
into the mind we will discover its great abilities.

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 One way of reading the mind incorrectly is by being caught up
in thinking, in that mass of agitating mental activity. Agitation
is one of the Five Hindrances. It makes us worried and restless,
it generates more and more mental proliferation. But we can
say, ‘Stop. I am just going to be with my breath for five minutes.’
That’s all. Of course, the little child inside may say, ‘No! I’m not
going to do that! I’m only going to do what I want! I won’t do
stupid things like paying attention to the breath!’ Listen to that
childish voice and then gently bring your attention back to the
breath. The mind is very trainable. It is not too difficult to train,
it just needs correct reading and learning the skill of calming
the mind and letting go.

When you are confused, upset or agitated, this is just

thought. Every thought agitates the nervous system and has
an immediate effect on the body. When we don’t know our
mind, our thoughts, we don’t have the space to see what is

40
happening. We suddenly find ourselves in a mess and think,
‘What happened?!’ We don’t realize that we’ve been thinking
in a particular way for a long time. Instead of looking at what
has been going on in our minds, perhaps we have been blaming
somebody else for our problems, and we’ve been so busy
finding somebody to blame that we’ve forgotten our Buddhist
practice of conscientiously looking at our mind, at our way of
thinking. We can think negatively about someone: ‘She is so
stupid. She is irritating and horrible. She’s hopeless. She hates
me and I hate her.’ We can think like that for years without
ever questioning the effect those thoughts have on our life.

The mind is powerful. We have to be very careful about what

we think. We manifest the world with our thoughts. If that’s
not a motivation to be free of defilements, I don’t know what
is! If the suffering in our lives is increasing, we should double-
check what is happening. Maybe we are not doing something

41
 right. We don’t have to accuse or blame ourselves. The
teaching just asks us to be intelligent and take responsibility
for ourselves so that we can grow and mature. Then we can
deal more confidently with our diseases and we won’t need a
doctor; we can actually be our own physician. We can be with
our inner Buddha, and that is so empowering and joyful. And
then, when we see the misery that we are unknowingly causing
ourselves, we learn how to become humble, bow down and say,
‘Yes. Okay. I’ll start again.’

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 PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Luang Por Waen calls the present ‘correct Dhamma’. He refers

to the past and future as ‘drunken Dhamma’. That conveys the
right message. We are lost if we are not in the present moment,
because the present moment is mindfulness; mindfulness is
present moment awareness. Past and future exist only through
our thoughts, which remember the past and project the future.
The Forest Masters are very creative with their language.
The phrase ‘drunken Dhamma’ is a good image to inspire us,
because we all know that the results of being drunk are not
very pleasant.

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 LIVING IN REALITY

When the weather is beautiful, we notice how the human mind

is influenced and affected by the brightness of sunshine. On a
sunny day in England, I always feel that the sunshine brings
happiness into people’s minds, and when they’re happy they
seem to get along better naturally. What happens to our minds
when the clouds come? When the mind is miserable, it is
difficult to connect with people.
The Buddha’s entire teaching is about finding a happiness
which is different from conventional happiness. Conventional
happiness gives way to misery and unsatisfactory experiences.
We tend to be experts in conditioned happiness; not a
stable, fundamental happiness, but a happiness dependent
on things. Some of those things are healthy and helpful, but
others are destructive and can lead us to misery, sickness,
addiction and obsession.

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Buddhist teaching is a clear map to psychological health. The
Buddha shows very clearly where the mind becomes diseased
and the path that takes the mind to a state of health. There are
many aspects to that path. One of the first important teachings
I learned from Ajahn Sumedho was how to develop the ability
to see life as it is and to simply learn from it, not to fall into
the traps of judging, criticizing, wanting things to be different,
feeling constantly discontented.

Remember to receive life as it is.

This is the first step towards living in reality, rather than

in dreams which can easily turn into nightmares when we
identify with them. If we don’t identify with the dreams, we
can feel freedom in our hearts. Then we can go through both
nightmares and pleasant dreams, but not need to depend on
any of them to be happy. Then we experience life as it is, and
let go of life – we don’t push it away, we just let it go. This is not

45
 ‘me’ doing something, it is a clear seeing. Awareness itself is
what enables the mind to let go.

We use this teaching as an entry into learning, with an approach

that is tolerant and accepting, benevolent and compassionate.
It is not an approach that continues to divide, dissect, make
judgements and criticize. It is an approach that is whole,
wholesome, all-encompassing; an approach of non-contention,
as Ajahn Sumedho would describe it. We are not contending
with the reality of ‘now’, we are just able to see it as it is.

To see something clearly depends on certain conditions.

We learn to appreciate what it means to be still. What does
that mean? It simply means that you stop moving with the
movements of your mind. You stop agitating yourself with that
which is agitated in yourself, being confused with that which
is confused within you, being unhappy with that which is
unhappy inside you. When we reach the place of stopping and

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being still, the condition of seeing arises naturally in the mind.
A seeing mind doesn’t move. It has stopped. It is here, now.

There are many different methods, techniques and teachings

of meditation. Vipassana practice involves exploring the mind
and seeing the result of that exploration. It leads to seeing
clearly what the Buddha called the three characteristics
of phenomena: everything is impermanent, everything is
unsatisfactory and everything is ‘not what you are’ (anicca,
dukkha, anattā). Vipassana means being able to see deeply
and clearly, to know profoundly. When you see clearly, you
have access to the reality of now. This is not something you
imagine or have to believe; it is something you see clearly.
Vipassana is an invitation to explore: ‘Is this satisfactory or
unsatisfactory?’ Maybe you think you find greed or its object
extremely satisfactory. On the other hand, maybe you find that
the feeling of greed arising in the heart is not so pleasant and

47
 restful. The Buddha invites us to really examine the excitement
of this world of desires. He draws our attention to the danger of
believing in this world of sensuality and its complexities, and
to really apply our attention, to question and investigate.

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 PATIENCE, ENERGY, INTEREST

Practice takes patience, energy, and a very deep interest in

discovering what the Buddha means by greed, hatred and
delusion. Very often the interest comes when we are at the
end of our rope. It is not necessarily something that comes
naturally. Many people come to practise because they have
seen that suffering, limitation and confusion are not the way
forward. They have realized that they are living in a subjective
reality and they don’t want to carry on living in that kind of
world. So the practice often starts with, ‘I’m fed up with this.
I don’t want it anymore. I’ve had enough of suffering, of being
confused, deluded and angry.’ Sometimes we don’t actually
move in the right direction until we have been pushed by the
sense of ‘enough is enough.’ It doesn’t have to be dramatic; it can
be very subtle. Little by little we accumulate an understanding
about anger, for example, and we realize that the state of anger

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 is not something we want to live in all the time or part of the
time or even any time at all. Perhaps we come to know that the
mind can be quiet and peaceful and we naturally feel the quiet
loveliness of the peaceful mind.

This can come about through silence. Silence has a way of

making us feel connected. We notice our mind is silent and
suddenly we are back at home. Much of the time, our senses
are taking us ‘out there’. We don’t realize that the world
begins in the citta, in our heart/mind. The senses and their
objects are constantly triggering our citta, so when we are in
turmoil we tend to blame outside factors: people, situations,
the world in general. When we bring the citta to a place of
coolness and calm we have a chance to look at our responses.
We can begin to clearly see that what manifests outside is very
much a reflection of our mind itself. It may take a while to see
this clearly because human beings have so many things going

50
on in their minds. It’s a very complex inner world. We react
to things twice over; we react once and then we react again.
We find ourselves trapped in reactions, but that’s not our
fault, as in fact there is nobody to blame. If we want to blame
anything, we should blame avijjā (ignorance). We can’t blame
ourselves for being blind. We didn’t ask to be blind. We haven’t
invited blindness into our lives. The blindness just came along
with us and our bodies and minds, so we can’t really feel bad
about it. That’s why the Buddha doesn’t make a big issue out
of guilt. Instead, he draws our attention to understanding
ways of reacting.

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 THE PATH OF LIBERATION

When we attempt to follow a religious path, we sometimes

approach the teachings and practices at a superficial level
which has little to do with liberation. We may start feeling that
we have to become something or somebody, to create ourselves
and behave in accordance with a mistaken understanding of
that particular teaching. When we start following the Buddha’s
path we may fear that we have to be a certain way and that
doing something wrong would be terrible and jeopardize our
freedom. We begin to see ourselves in a certain way and feel we
have to constantly prop up this ‘Buddhist self’ who has to be
good and kind – has to play a part, in other words.

But that’s not freedom. The Buddhist teaching of liberation is a

free vehicle. It doesn’t have a specific name. The Buddha never
called his teaching ‘Buddhism’. Liberation is an aspiration that

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arises naturally when the mind realizes that it is in bondage,
caught up in the pain of delusion, anger and greed. The danger
with ‘religion’ is that, grasped wrongly, it can take you back to
those same things – greed, hatred and delusion. You can see
that everywhere in the world.

Liberation is letting go of images about ourselves. It is difficult

because what we call the ‘ego’ is made up of images, many of
which are built up by fear and don’t disappear easily. We don’t
become ‘somebody’ in our minds because ‘we’ have created that
somebody, but just because it is created and manifests through
greed, hatred, fear, delusion, envy, jealousy and many other
unhealthy, unskilful mental states and intentions. To overcome
this the Buddha offers a lot of very good, clear guidelines for
integrating the path in our daily lives and helping the mind to
cultivate qualities that are rooted in kindness and goodness.
These guidelines come from his own experience. If we trust the

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 Buddha’s experience, we have confidence in what he teaches.
Indeed, we can see this for ourselves. When we do, say or think
something good, when we manifest qualities that are skilful,
healthy and sound, the result will always be a happier mind.
We don’t need to believe the Buddha to see that. We experience
it for ourselves as we apply close attention.

When we see this, we find it fascinating that we did not see

it before. That was because of ignorance, avijja. Sometimes
these qualities manifest in what we call the unconscious or the
subconscious. There are layers upon layers of mental activities
of which we are unaware. That is why it is really worthwhile
to pursue this path. If we truly want to discover what it is to
free the mind, we can do this by paying deep attention to the
mind itself, clearly seeing cause and result. We don’t have to be
perfect to do this; if we had to wait until we were perfect, we
would wait for a long time.

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Many of us have been discouraged by seeing our delusion and
have almost abandoned any interest in the path because we
feel, ‘I’m so greedy (or impatient, angry, etc.), I can’t do it. I
can’t follow this path. I can’t be a Buddhist because I am so
deluded.’ But in fact, it is because we are deluded that we need
to walk the Path. And we need to make peace with our delusion.
What else is there to work with? Buddhism wouldn’t need to
exist if we didn’t have anger, greed and ignorance. The Buddha
brought this path into the world of humans to illuminate those
mind-states, not to make us believe that by just reading or
listening to his teachings, or meditating, we are instantly going
to turn into a holy being.

If our minds are miserable, we can look at our belief systems.

We may have very strong beliefs that are not conducive to
happiness, such as, ‘Nobody likes me’, ‘I can’t stand that person’
or ‘I’m no good.’ We may find we are attached to rites and

55
 rituals, doubt, or many other things. We see those things and
we acknowledge them in a way that is liberating. We don’t have
to eradicate our mind, kill it, trample on it, squeeze it, squash
it, or turn it into something completely dead and miserable. We
start by using the instrument we have at our disposal, and this
instrument is called ‘mind and body.’ We use this instrument
to face life and our ‘self’ as they are. That takes strength.
It takes energy. It takes interest, fearlessness, compassion
and patience. It takes many things to be able to look at
reality as it is.

Once we become more mindful, we start noticing small things

that we would have missed before: little details of the kindness
of others, small things they do or say, small things they manifest
in thought and words. We begin to notice these manifestations
of kindness and our world becomes much happier. We can easily
create a world of anger, a negative, critical and undermining

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world, simply because we don’t notice the noble qualities in
people. Through mindfulness we break our habit of creating
negativity, of undermining others and ourselves. Through
mindfulness we notice when people are kind, or generous, the
small things that make us see the world in a happier way.

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 MERIT

In Buddhism, because we experience our mind and use our

lives and minds to see and understand the world, we begin
to know what a ‘blessing’ is. Basically it means ‘happiness’ or
‘merit’. The Buddha said, ‘Do not fear merit, bhikkhus. Merit
is another word for happiness.’ So we offer ourselves blessings
by making merit. There is happiness in merit, the happiness
of accumulating good conditions, good roots, good factors; all
that brings happiness to our hearts. That is why the Buddha
says that ‘merit’ is another word for ‘happiness’.

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 MAKING PEACE

The Buddha gives us a lot of tools that we can use, but the tools
don’t constitute liberation. They are only means to an end.
Liberation is when we start letting go, when we start freeing
the heart through renouncing all the things that are redundant
in our minds and keep us in misery, such as depression, despair,
lack of confidence, fear, anxiety. These qualities may make
us think there is something wrong with us, but no. There is
nothing wrong with us. Human life is really difficult. We have
to attend to so many things just to survive at the physical level.
We may have to look after people. Some of you are married
and look after children, pets, a house, a car and bank accounts.
There’s nothing wrong with that. It is not easy to live a human
life. Dealing with all these things demands a lot of energy, but
those demands are not an obstacle to liberation. If you feel your
life is difficult and troublesome, don’t blame yourself; it is just

59
 human life and it’s like that. So hopefully you can make peace
with being human, with the joy and the misery of a human life,
and continue to develop a sense of great gratitude towards the
Buddha’s teaching. The Dhamma enables us to live our human
life with a sense that it is worthwhile. It doesn’t need to have
a ‘meaning’. We may never find a meaning in it, but we can
come to understand and make the best of it. The meaning of life
is life itself.

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 DUKKHA

‘Dukkha’ is also sometimes translated as ‘difficult to bear.’ We

meet this difficulty in our meditation practice. At some point
in meditation, maybe often, maybe not so often, we may sense
something difficult to bear, and that we’ve got to move the
body or the mind to change something. If we pay attention to
this moment, we might be able to realize the ending of that
desire to move, that moment which is difficult to bear in a
small or deep way.

If we find that our mind feels dull, there are many ways of
working with this. We can bring attention back to the body
sitting. We can investigate this quality of dullness as an object
of observation. What does dullness feel like? We begin to see
that it has a quality of vibration. It is changing all the time; it is
not just one uniform mass. We can feel it in both the physical

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 and the mental body. We can double-check that moment when
our mind says, ‘I’ve got to move’ or ‘Something has to change.’
We try to stay with it, and if we do that, we may actually
realize the ending of that pressurizing mind. Begin to know
that the mind can sometimes feel like a pressurizing force.
Sometimes we think that pressure only comes from our outer
life, but actually it comes from within, from the way we react to
the outer life. When we take refuge in the Buddha/Dhamma/
Sangha, we stop wanting life to be perfect and turn inwards to
see whether our responses to life are just reactive habits, often
tinted by anger, aversion, frustration, impatience and so on.

As we establish our mind in the refuge of awareness, we can

see something much lighter about what goes on in the mind.
We keep re-establishing this refuge of mindfulness, awareness.
Whatever appears in this reflective, mirror-like space, notice
the arising and the ending. Notice the space between, the time

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when nothing has arisen, when no mind objects are present,
when nothing is reflected. Notice the moments when there is
the feeling that the mind is just resting.

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 TAKING REFUGE

We take refuge in the Buddha.

We take refuge in the Dhamma.
We take refuge in the Sangha.

Reciting the Refuges is a good reminder of the place to which

mindfulness takes us. Buddha/Dhamma/Sangha is really one place.

The Buddha is the awakened mind. The Dhamma is the truth

discovered through the awakened mind. The Sangha has both an
external and an internal aspect. Externally it is the community
of all those who have been enlightened or reached stages of
enlightenment during their lifetimes, and the community of
spiritual friends who are on the path with us. Internally the
Sangha is the purity of the heart. It is all happening right here,
right now. It manifests as wisdom, right view, clarity of mind,
understanding, insight – realization of Dhamma.

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 AN INVITATION TO EXPLORE

Many of you know that the goal of the Buddhist path is to reach
nibbāna. But nibbāna is not actually a world or a realm or a
state. It is absence, the absence of greed, hatred and delusion. It
is often referred to as ‘the cooling down of the mind’. How can
we conceive the absence of something? We can’t. How can we
imagine nibbāna? Instead of seeking to describe it, the Buddha
pointed to what we know. One thing we know is suffering. It
is not difficult for a human being to realize how difficult life
is – we have to toil and work to be able to eat, to keep warm,
to have a home, to make and keep our friends, and to deal
with the people we don’t really want in our lives anymore,
such as parents with whom we maybe don’t get on, to develop
relationships that may be wonderful or disastrous. Dukkha is
not very far away. It is in every corner of our life.

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 The opposite of dukkha is sukha, which means ‘happiness’ or
‘ease’. There is suffering, but there is also happiness. Both
are essential aspects of human experience. When there is
sukha, the human heart wants more of it. During meditation,
you notice the mind is peaceful and blissful for a few minutes
and there’s an immediate tendency (if the mind is untrained)
to assume that this state should last, but of course it doesn’t.
‘Why is my happy, blissful moment of meditation turning into
an awful memory of my last relationship (or job, or whatever)?
I was blissed out of my mind, and suddenly up came an awful
memory of when I was a child and my mother screamed at me.’
These memories leave traces, marks in our hearts and minds.
Sometimes when a memory is extreme it constitutes a trauma.
Sometimes it is just called ‘painful memory.’

Sukha and dukkha work together. The more we run away from
dukkha, the more we want sukha; the more we want sukha, the

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more dukkha pops its head up. It is like a pendulum. The mind
is like a pendulum.

The Buddha did not speak much about what happens once we
get to the absence of greed, hatred and delusion, though in the
Udana he describes it in this way:

There is the unborn, uncreated, unformed, unoriginated,

and therefore there is an escape from the born, created,
formed, originated. If it were not for the unborn, uncreated,
unformed, unoriginated, there would be no escape from
the born, created, formed, originated, but because there
is the unborn, uncreated, unformed, unoriginated, there
is an escape, there is liberation from the born, created,
formed, originated.

Udana 8.3

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 The Buddha taught profoundly and very broadly on the dukkha
of human existence and, fortunately, he also expounded on
the way out of dukkha. He offered us his unrivalled knowledge
of the mind, not in the way science examines the human
brain as an apparatus that puts us in touch with the world
outside, but from the perspective of how to end dukkha. As
one teacher said, ‘The whole path of Buddhism is to decrease
suffering.’ So if you have suffering in your life, double-check:
this is a symptom of something. It is not that you are ‘bad’.
It is not something to be taken personally. None of us would
have taken an interest in the Buddha’s teaching if we hadn’t
at some point experienced a sense of being fed up with living
blindly. Most of us have experienced regret and misery. We
have felt unable to deal with suffering, stuck and incapable of
liberating our heart.

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The Buddhist path touches on every aspect of ourselves and
every aspect of life. It is not just a set of methods to calm the
mind down. It shows us that everything we do, say and think
is interconnected. Everything we do has a result, bears a fruit.
In our practice of meditation we learn to notice, to look, to
see. This requires complete willingness to participate actively
in the research. That is why we need to be awake. The word
‘Buddha’ means ‘awake’. If you are not awake you don’t have
the energy that is necessary to penetrate this knowledge of the
mind. The mind is very tricky. It is a very difficult thing to hold
for even a second. Everything moves and changes very quickly.
Ajahn Chah used the simile of catching a fish with your hands.
I’ve never caught a fish, but I imagine it is very slippery. You
can’t hold it for very long. Ajahn Chah compared the mind to a
slippery fish.

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 But the mind doesn’t feel like a slippery fish. It can feel more as
if we are being crushed underneath heaps of dukkha. So when
we practise meditation we are affecting our lives in a deeper
way than we imagine. We are having a taste of the absence of
greed, hatred and delusion in a very small dose. For just a few
minutes we see the mind when it is not attached. We begin
to notice what that feels like. We begin to see, for example,
that greed has a cause. Then we see it disappearing. What has
happened? We have noticed the end of a moment of greed. The
same can happen with anger. We become really upset because
we don’t get something we want. Then we suddenly observe
what is happening; we begin to see, we can listen to it, feel it
and notice when it has ended.

This requires a certain amount of attentiveness, because

sometimes it is subtle. Before we began practising, we rarely
paid attention to the moments when something ended – the

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ending of a state of greed or anger, the ending of anything; as
soon as we felt okay we would move on to the birth of the next
state: ‘I’m all right now. Let me find somebody else I can be with
(or another piece of cake, etc.).’ We forget. But mindfulness is
remembering: remembering to look, to see, to be interested
in this life which is creating our world moment by moment.
What is our world right now? Are we happy? Are we peaceful?
Are we a mixed bag of both or neither peace nor happiness,
or this or that? Grey? Unformed? That is called confusion.
Are we confused?

Basically, unless we are developing the skill of seeing, we can’t

know; we can’t know something unless we see it. When we
practise meditation, we calm the mind artificially by making
use of a word, a mantra or the breath. Such a technique can
help the mind to calm down so that you can see and hear
inwardly more clearly.

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 When the mind is not in a good place, I’ve noticed that it
doesn’t function very well. The mind needs care. For instance,
if your mind feels miserable, sometimes just noticing what
is happening can bring a balance to the mind. The mind is
comforted and then ready to continue working better. When
we listen to our mind, it brings peace, and peace can bring
energy into our mind.

The practice is an invitation to thoroughly explore the

manifestation and structure of thoughts, feelings and moods.
We begin to notice details, causes and results. This requires
stillness, attention and motivation. Interest is one of the
primary conditions. It is called ‘chanda’ in Pali and it is a
wholesome form of desire. Sometimes people find Buddhism
depressing because they assume it means they can’t want
anything, and as soon as they want something they feel they
have failed. But the Buddha’s path is not about ‘not wanting’,

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it is about noticing, studying the experience of desire, and
letting go. There is a difference between a healthy desire and
an unhealthy one. We may notice that a desire to be happy
has made us unhappy because we have become hooked on the
experience of happiness. But we can live without depending
on a feeling of happiness. Not only that, we can also find a
different kind of happiness that is more subtle – the happiness
of freedom, the happiness of a mind liberated from dependence
on wanting to be happy.

The Precepts are the first basic directions; they give us a

sound foundation. We want to be happy – but do we want to
kill, steal, lie, be promiscuous? Do we want to speak in a way
that destroys our happiness? Do we want to take intoxicating
drinks and drugs? We go straight into renunciation with the
Five Precepts. We renounce anger and destructive emotions,
stealing and lying, using our sexual energy for selfish ends. We

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 renounce using our ability to communicate and speak in a way
that perpetuates a miserable world, and weakening control of
our mind through intoxicating drink and drugs.

It is important to know that the first step on the path is to be

human, not to be a Buddha. There is a tendency to be very
ambitious, but great ambition can result in disappointment.
Vipassana practice is simply the study of mind and body, and
seeing the three characteristics to which the Buddha pointed –
everything is impermanent, everything is unsatisfactory, and
everything is not a ‘self’, there is no permanent ‘me’.

At first the idea of not having a ‘me’ in charge of everything

may be devastating: ‘How can I live without my commander-
in-chief?’ But when we see that the self is truly an illusion,
we discover lots of blessings along the way. We are not left
abandoned, flattened by the lack of aspiration and motivation.
It is not like that at all. What takes us to realization of no-

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self is wisdom. And wisdom is not a small thing; it is really
worth exchanging delusion for wisdom. Wisdom is much
more powerful, much more capable than delusion. It is able to
respond to life with delight, so we can delight in the responses
we see coming from a mind that is not caught up in delusion, a
mind that knows.

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 FEELING HAPPY

The mind that is not attached is already quite happy. This is

a happiness that never goes. It is something we can taste in
our meditation practice. We begin to notice that we are happy
when we don’t want anything. What kind of happiness is not
wanting? At the point of not wanting, we are experiencing not
being reborn into something. Desire is rebirth. We are reborn
all the time in this sense, so we know rebirth. And we want a
happy rebirth, don’t we? If we are a normal human being we
want to be happy. I’m not dismissing that; it is really important
to want to be happy. But if we constantly cling to happiness
that is dependent on conditions, we won’t know the peace and
happiness that emerge from a mind which is content, peaceful,
empty of incessant wanting.
We can experiment with this in ourselves. We can test it,
explore, enquire. We can question and have the freedom to

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find out for ourselves whether the teaching is true or not.
We begin to take notice, rather than being obsessed with
perfecting a particular quality of mind. Instead we learn to
relax in the present moment. There may be the wish to have a
happy mind, a radiant and peaceful mind. All these desires are
natural. These are healthy motivations, called chanda in Pali.
But work must be done to get to that point. When we say, ‘I
want to be happy’, we learn to recognize this mind state and
allow mindfulness to see it as it is, instead of using wilfulness
to try to get what we want according to an idea.

Then we can begin to notice the ‘do-er’ and the ‘doing’. The
idea of being able to get somewhere without ‘doing’ anything
can be difficult to understand. How can I get somewhere
without ‘me’? And yet when we practise our meditation, little
by little and with patience we begin to withstand the power
of ‘me’ wanting to do something. Instead of ‘me! me! me!’, we

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 begin to simply understand. We hear those voices shouting
‘me!’, and our attitude is: ‘Yes – I hear you. You want to be good.
You want concentration. You want to be a good meditator. I
understand that you are in a hurry, that you think you have a
better way. But for now we are doing it like this.’ Sometimes
you have to talk to yourself in this way. ‘The Buddha-mind is
in charge. The wakeful mind is in charge. Okay?’ Talk to the
mind firmly sometimes. Otherwise it will just keep making you
feel miserable and dragging you back onto the treadmill of
suffering, lamentation and grief.

78
 LOVE

‘Love’ is a loaded word. I ‘love’ my sandwich. I ‘love’ my

wife. There is selfless love and selfish love. The love in the
Buddha’s teaching has to do with compassion. He talks about
universal love. He also talks about the danger of love based on
attachment. We don’t have to judge these different aspects of
love. We experiment starting from our own experience in life.
What is this love which is not dependent on our desires, on
wanting to have things our own way? Compassion is a natural
empathy for ourselves and others. We want the best for others.
Loving-kindness does not ask for something in return. It is the
natural response of generosity.

Before going to sleep we chant the Metta Sutta. Metta is a very

good remedy for a sound sleep. We can fill up our mind with
loving thoughts and generate this feeling of loving-kindness

79
 towards ourselves and all beings. This has a very powerful effect.
A mind suffused with loving-kindness is a conscious mind. It
is an intelligent mind. We all have this kind of intelligence, so
tap into it. We don’t need to think about it a lot, just feel this
mind that at this moment is like a container filled with loving-
kindness.

May I be well.
May I be happy.
May I be at ease.

May all beings be well.

May all beings be happy.
May all beings be at ease.

80
 BIOGRAPHY

Ajahn Sundara was born in France in 1946 and studied dance there
and in England. In her early thirties, whilst living and studying in
England, she attend a talk and later a retreat led by Ajahn Sumedho.
His teachings and experiences of the monastic way of life in the
Forest Tradition resonated deeply.
In 1979 she asked to join the monastic community at Chithurst
Monastery in England as one of the first four women novices. In
1983 she was given the Going Forth as a Siladhara (10-precept nun)
by Ajahn Sumedho. After five years at Chithurst, she went to live at
Amaravati Monastery, where she participated in the establishment of
the nuns’ community.
Between 1995 until 1998 she deepened her practice mostly in
Thai Forest monasteries. In 2000, after spending a year as the
senior incumbent of the nuns community at the Devon Vihara,
she was based at Abhayagiri Monastery in the United States. She
currently lives at Amaravati Monastery where she explores ways of
practising, sustaining and integrating Buddhist teachings in Western
culture. Since the late 1980’s she has taught and led meditation
retreats worldwide.
 Paccuppanna
The Present Moment
BY AJAHN SUNDARA

2017 © AMARAVATI PUBLICATIONS

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 Paccuppanna The Present Moment
Paccuppanna
The Present Moment

Ajahn Sundara
Dhamma Reflections by

Ajahn Sundara

Paccupana-COVER.indd 1 02/06/2017 09:32