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| Nibbana isn't something refined, but it is
subtle, it's asking us to pay attention rather than to refine ourselves. So "the
realisation of cessation": how does that work in your life in practical terms? Well,
I try to witness the way things end in my mind; and I notice that cessation when I really
pay attention. It's easy enough to see this in the case of thoughts because thought moves
quite quickly, so I develop the skill of thinking in a very slow and deliberate way. Then
I can observe the gaps, the spaces between thoughts, and the end of each thought. But then the emotions linger, don't they? They hang around. They have a lot of inertia, and don't move so quickly. Often you're stuck with moods and feelings in your mind such as sadness or despair or resentment. Then the intuitive awareness of that feeling is that it is like "this" and you go right into the feeling, totally embracing the emotional feeling, not judging it, analysing but just letting it be like "this." Take grief, for example, the loss of somebody you love: it's like "this." |
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When my mother died I really explored that sense of loss rather than trying to smother the emotion or ignore it. I determined to grieve, to really know this feeling and to embrace the whole emotion of grief. Then through that, it naturally ceased. It wasn't repressed or forced. I realised the cessation of a condition. I witnessed, I was there when it ended. So that's putting realisation into a practical context, it’s nothing fantastic or all that difficult. It just takes your willingness to do that and your trust, your confidence that you can do that. Then to recognise that when grief ceased there is peace: when that emotion had finished, then there was a sense of real peacefulness and bliss. Not a blissed-out high but a lovely feeling of emptiness, of non-attachment and realisation that it's like "that." So you're really informing your conscious life with wisdom all the time, both with the presence of the conditioned, the attachment to the conditioned and the non-attachment to the conditioned. To know both, with no preference. |
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