As a monk, I bring a strong commitment, along with the renunciate flavor, to the classic Buddhist teachings. I play with ideas, with humor and a current way of expressing the teachings, but I don't dilute them.
Sitting in a field of fifty to eighty people really starts my mind sparking. Since I don't prepare my talks ahead of time, I find myself listening to what I'm saying along with everyone else. This leaves a lot of room for the Dhamma to come up. Just having eighty people listening to me is enough to engage me, stimulate me, and create a nice flow of energy. The actual process of teaching evokes ideas that even I did not realize were being held somewhere in my mind.
Different teaching situations offer their own unique value. In retreat, you are able to build a cohesive and comprehensive body of the teachings. When people are not on retreat and come for one session, it opens a different window. They are more spontaneous and I'm given the chance to contact them in ways that are closer to their "daily-life mind." This brings up surprises and interesting opportunities for me to learn even more.
I'm continually struck by how important it is to establish a foundation of morality, commitment, and a sense of personal values for the Vipassana teachings to rest upon. Personal values have to be more than ideas. They have to actually work for us, to be genuinely felt in our lives. We can't bluff our way into insight. The investigative path is an intimate experience that empowers our individuality in a way that is not egocentric. Vipassana encourages transpersonal individuality rather than ego enhancement. It allow for a spacious authenticity to replace a defended personality.
In the process of body meditation, the notional conventional body drops away and we find the citta body. With the cultivation of appamano states, it is nourished and strengthened to meet our negative afflictive states and heal them.
The boundless nature of citta can make us feel too vulnerable, so we put up boundaries that end up constricting us. Cultivation of the brahmaviharā, the measureless states, is a removal of those boundaries. An abiding place results that can act as a foundation for complete liberation.
If we keep picking up and resonating the brahmaviharā heart tones, citta will naturally open and move in that direction. These are natural expressions of citta – it feels rewarded with these expressions and is energized.
Questions about involuntary movements in practice; please you comment on the third tetrad of ānāpānasati; please review the potential value of jhāna experiences; say more about how ignorance sucks energy from citta; deep fears and primal memories.
Meditation is a whole life process. Proper cultivation of citta – diligence, vigilance, careful attention in our attitudes and actions – can lead to degrees of liberation. Topics of samadhi, jhāna, wisdom are addressed.
Lingering is part of the process of absorbing. It takes time to learn. Establish reference points to return to, lingering with no particular agenda. Keep widening and softening attention over the whole body.
Please expand on terms kusala and akusala; right effort when working with body tension; is thought consciousness the same as anusaya (latent tendencies); please describe Thai Forest’s particular way of teaching dhamma; does stepping back out of the conditioned into the unconditioned refer to the unrestricted unbounded citta; how is yoniso manasikara different from mindfulness; comments on Venerable Paññavaddho’s view on citta.
Meditation is a process repeatedly placing attention. Keep touching references of comfort and steadiness, listen and linger until citta picks up the sign. We begin to learn what is suitable, what is working to gladden citta. It then has the strength to break down the afflictions of heart and body.
Please explain Ajahn Maha Boowa’s comment that citta ‘does not die’; is the experience of something that sees and receives experience citta; is citta what Tibetans call ‘mind itself’; is pure citta synonymous with pure knowing; please clarify comment about ‘storms passing through’ in relation to suicide; do we know when we are experiencing citta; how to rest in citta, the place of no ‘I’?
