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means non-grasping, non-greed, non-hatred, it means not pushing away,
and it means not going to sleep, but seeing what is present for us. Bare
attention, remembering, being in the present, without trying to change it
somehow,which is a hard thing to learn because we re generally planning
on what we re going to make thissomethinginto next. But then what hap-
pens? We end up doing that all the time and missing all the somethings
that are here, always waiting for the next one.
Mindfulness is really a way of learning to see what is here in a very
clear way. People talk about learning mystical things in meditation or
spiritual life. There is nothing more mystical, or startling, or bizarre, or
amazing, than what is right in front of us. In my days I ve done a lot of
strange things. I ve been to a lot of different countries on this planet, and
observed saddhus on beds of nails in India, and strange animals in other
parts of the world, and in my early days I took a number of the various
kinds of psychedelics and drugs one could take, and have had all kinds
of realms and weird experiences, and all kinds of things in meditation. I
have never encountered a realm as peculiar, or bizarre, or as interesting
as this one.
99
Someone said:
The mystery of life is not a problem to solve,
or something that you find somewhere else,
but it s a reality to experience here.
We went to the zoo with the baby on Sunday. If you landed on some
weird planet, and then you saw pygmy hippopotamuses or 300 pound
ostriches and really wrinkled elephants  Did you ever look at elephant
skin? Just amazing!  or the kind of snakes that are there, or sloths
hanging upside down, you would say you had come by your spaceship to
a really peculiar planet. And yet we forget that. We start to take it all for
granted. It all becomes very ordinary, and it s not. If you attend a birth,
it s an amazing thing to see a baby being born out of a human body. How
does that happen? How does it get in there? I know you know how it
gets in there. But I mean, how does it really get in there? Like the ship
in the bottle. An incredible thing happens in there, the baby coming out
of a woman. And we take it for granted.
So to pay attention means to somehow have a newer or a fresher
vision, to see clearly. It means to stop our judging and our planning and
just see what s here, which is part of what we do in meditation; to stop
and not judge a single thing; let it be exactly how it is. Let God take over
for a little while and run the show rather than our minds, which get very
tired, and very full, and very busy anyway, and need a rest.
Someone said:
The classic question is: If you pay attention
and you don t judge, then how do you live
in the world? What part of attention or
awareness is that?
That s called sampajanna. Sati is mindfulness, sampajanna means
clear or right comprehension. It means not only do you pay attention
to what s here, but then when you act in your life you also look at the
context, at the suitability or the intention of it; what is present. When
you act, you first have to see what s here, and then some intuition, or
inspiration, or thought arises,  I ll do this or do that. It s to pay attention
to where your heart is, what motivates you, what the intention and the
purpose of your action is, so that you pay attention but you also note
the context.
100 Chapter 8. Right Awareness
The way Joseph, my colleague and friend, answers the question
when people say,  When you just pay attention and note  lifting,moving,
placing in the walking, or the in and out of the breathing, how can you
live? He said,  Well, I was doing my lifting,moving, placing one day on
a road in India near the Burmese temple where I lived, just moving my
feet and paying attention, and all of a sudden I heard  clang, clang of the
bells, and I recognized it. I knew what those bells were. I looked up and
sure enough the elephant that lived in town was coming down the road
right towards me. I noted  hearing, hearing and  seeing, seeing ; then I
noticed the intention to move out of the way arise, and then I walked out
of the way.
So there are two parts. The first is seeing what is here, living in the
reality of the present, and then responding to it wisely, being aware of
the situation that we re in.
At times this year I ve talked in this class about another aspect of
awareness which I think is really important to remember in our lives,
and that is the very interesting question of why we don t pay attention;
why do we go to sleep, why do we drive on automatic pilot, why do we
eat three meals a day, two-thirds or three-quarters or ninety percent of
it on automatic pilot? Why do we live so much not here? It s a pretty
interesting question, maybe even more interesting than saying,  One
should pay attention or live in the present. How come we don t?
There s a story:
When Krushchev pronounced his famous denunciation of Stalin,
someone in the Russian Congress Hall was reported to have said,
 And where were you, Comrade Krushchev, when all these innocent
people were being slaughtered? Krushchev paused, looked around
the hall, and said,  Will the man who said that kindly stand up?
Tension mounted in the hall. No one moved. Finally Krushchev
said,  Well, whoever you are, you have your answer now. I was
in exactly the same position then that you are in now.
Why is it that we don t pay attention? One reason is fear, that if we
actually come into the present, there are certain things we have to deal
with that we haven t had to in our lives. For some people it s boredom.
We re really afraid of being bored. For some it s loneliness. For some
it s grieving, something in their hearts that s not finished. So it s better to [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]