Lessons In Practical Buddhism - Sirimangalo.Org

I’m just a robot or just a physical organism? Really non-self is
when you say to yourself, for example, “hearing, hearing,”
and the mind expects the sound to go in this way or go
according to its desire, to continue – that you will say,
“hearing, hearing,” and there will always be something for
you to hear. But then the sounds stop, and then you realize
that actually it’s quite stressful, this experience of sound,
since you don’t know when it’s going to start and when it’s
going to stop. You see that the experience, the sound at
your ear, your experience of hearing, is non-self.
Maybe it’s hard to understand if you’re not practicing, but I
think with even a little practice you can understand. You can
see that your experience is not under your control. You can’t
make me start to talk. You can’t make the sound arise, so
when you say, “hearing,” you feel this stress, this shaking up
of the mind, where the mind used to think, “here I am
listening, and I can sit here, and I’ll just listen, listen, listen,”
but the listening only occurs because of the hearing.
It sounds so simple and dumb actually, like this can’t be the
wisdom we’re looking for, but when you actually practice,
you see how stressful it is for the mind, that the mind really
is silly, the mind really is childish and ignorant in a kind of
embarrassing way; intellectually we already know it, but the
mind is betraying us. We already know that this is the case,
but we don’t really know it. We expect everything to go
according to our desires, according to our wishes, and so we
suffer when it’s not according to our wishes. When we see
this, we come to know that clinging and craving are the
causes of suffering.
asubhasaññā
Number three is asubhasaññā. This perception is also very
useful for meditators. Knowledge of loathsomeness arises
naturally in vipassanā meditation, but some people practice
meditation on loathsomeness: They break up the body into
parts: hair, body hair, nails, teeth, skin, and so on – all
thirty-two parts of the body. They break it up and look at
one part, the hair on their head for example, and they come
to realize how this hair is actually like some kind of moss
growing on a dung pile. You don’t have to imagine how
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