Amaravati Origins

When you're at the edge, and no longer caught in the conditioning of the mind, and you rest into that sound of silence, then you can really know what you're feeling. You can know the level of citta that you're experiencing in the present: whether the mood is happy or sad, pleasant or painful, or just confused. One afternoon fairly recently I was feeling some strong emotional state and my intellect was busily trying to analyse this emotion and making judgements about it -- so I just practised embracing both the intellectual desire to figure it out and the actual feeling of that emotion. The result was confusion. And so as I stayed with the confusion. Then the confusion dropped -- and I became aware of the cessation. So you can realise the cessation of emotional habits, not by getting rid of them or suppressing them but being aware when they're no longer present. Mindfulness is a factor that isn't going up and down with the conditions that you're experiencing, and so we have a refuge in awareness. And whether things are crazy or sensible or stupid or whatever, we're not judging it, we're just noticing that it's "like this."

So there is the escape from the created, the conditioned, the born, the originated because there is the unborn, the uncreated, the un-originated. That's realisation; it's not a Buddhist philosophical theory, it's realisable, it's reality, in other words. There is the realisation of the deathless; there is the realisation of cessation, of not-self and of emptiness.

Now, through my experience in monastic life over the years, I'd say this has to be something practical. Often religious teachings get exalted to the point where you feel you no longer can make them work; Nibba=na is one of those words in the Buddhist world that gets exalted. Realised beings like arahants and sotapannas are put on pedestals so that they're so high that most of us think that realsation is beyond our ability. But then, is that what the Buddha was teaching? Worshipping something on a pedestal? That we have faith in something up on a pedestal? Is that what he was teaching? You might as well worship beautiful golden goddesses on pedestals, if you're into worshipping things on pedestals!